Reconsidering foundational relationships between ethnography and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis – an introduction

The Special Issue on Ethnomethodology and Ethnography was developed out of a series of panels at the 2019 conference on ‘Practices’ of the ‘International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis’ held in Mannheim (Germany), from 2 to 5 July. These aimed at reconsidering, empirically as well as theoretically, the important and foundational relationships between Ethnography and Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) that often have been problematized and sometimes even considered antagonistic. This theme not only generated many more submissions than could be accepted, but it also drew a big audience and much interest, especially among EMCA scholars working ethnographically. It further stirred ongoing in-depth discussions that contributed to this volume. Considering contemporary developments within the diverse field of Ethnography, on the one hand, – that partly grew out of specific concerns such as sensory, digital, feminist, and post-colonial research – and current studies in EMCA, for example, on media, technology, and social inequalities, on the other hand, it seems that mutual overlaps and their potentials have partly been overlooked, under-conceptualized, and at times perhaps even obscured or misunderstood.

The timeliness of these discussions and their underlying theoretical issues are at the heart of this volume. Combining the efforts of the initially independent panels (by Yaël Kreplak and Alex Dennis; and by Christian Meier zu Verl and Clemens Eisenmann) has proven very productive. In view of the wide interest, we decided to publish two special issues, the first of which was published with Ethnographic Studies in late 2020 (Meier zu Verl et al., 2020) and we are very pleased to finally make the second volume available here with Qualitative Research.

The collected papers in this volume explore in-depth the relationships, entanglements, and subtle, but important differences between Ethnography and EMCA in their theoretical, methodological, and empirical grounds. The individual contributions show in different and complementary ways, how these relations address foundational problems and concerns of qualitative methodologies more generally as well as their particular solutions to issues in the ongoing discussions of contemporary qualitative research. Many of the issues raised, such as questions on situatedness, reflexivity or positionality, can be traced back to earlier debates, starting from the ‘value judgment controversy’ (Werturteilsstreit) in the 1900s, the ‘positivism dispute’ (Positivismusstreit) in the 1960s, the ‘Crisis of Representation’ in Ethnography in the 1980s, or the debates on reflexivity in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the 1990s. However, it is less well known that many of these issues have been crucial in the conception and development of EMCA from the 1950s onwards. Therefore, revisiting some of the background of early ethnomethodological ethnographies, as well as Sacks’ and Garfinkel's approaches, affords further insights into some of the epistemological challenges that have not only plagued sociology since its inception, but also contributed to its proliferation.

There has been an ongoing tradition of ethnomethodologically inflected ethnography for well over half a century, but its contributions to its ‘host’ perspectives is frequently overlooked. Ethnomethodology has enhanced fieldwork practice and ethnographic analysis, while these latter have informed the limits and possibilities of ethnomethodological analysis. There are also very different understandings and various kinds of ethnography that need to be distinguished. But all of them share that they afford insights into the way social interaction is assembled that are missing from accounts that do not consider Ethnography at all. Therefore, instead of playing off EMCA against Ethnography or the other way around, the papers in this volume show empirically and theoretically to what extent studies in ethnomethodology depend on or use ethnographic procedures, how ethnographies can explore constitutive practices of social order that are inherently ethnomethodological, and how the social situatedness, positionality, and bodies of researchers are themselves part and parcel of the social phenomena under study. Doing ethnomethodology and doing ethnography can thus go hand in hand, and some contributions propose the notion of ‘ethnomethodological ethnography’; they can also be mutually informative, or be utilized as resources, correctives, and/or refinements from either side. Instead of proposing one specific relationship, the volume follows the notion of methodological adequacy. In ethnomethodology, this highlights a ‘unique adequacy requirement of method’ (Garfinkel and Wieder, 1992) that relates to the unique practices and ethnomethods that constitute the particular social phenomena under study. Analogously, there can be as many forms of ethnographies, as there are social phenomena that rely on specific methodic practices to be recognizable and observable for the members of society as well as for ethnographic observers.

Thus, the papers of this volume offer various avenues and possibilities in exploring the relationships between ethnomethodology and ethnography that are informative not only for reconsidering and respecifying the foundational principles in qualitative research, but also for very specific empirical studies within and between both domains and beyond.

The Special Issue opens with a paper by Christian Meier zu Verl and Christian Meyer, ‘Ethnomethodological ethnography: Historical, conceptual, and methodological foundations’, which discusses central principles, conceptual foundations, and the historical development of ethnomethodological ethnography. Situating Garfinkel's epistemological reflections in the 1950s, they show how Garfinkel was partly building on discussions by Schütz (1953) and Kaufmann (1944), such as the distinction between correspondence- and congruence-theory. By further elaborating on how Garfinkel and his early collaborators, such as Bittner, Sudnow, Wieder, and Cicourel worked ethnographically, Meier zu Verl and Meyer discuss the crucial issue of adequate descriptions of social phenomena. These early ethnographies and their epistemological and methodological consequences for sociology have often been overlooked. Both authors make these hidden ethnographies of ethnomethodology visible as ‘ethnomethodological ethnographies’. Describing distinctive features of ethnomethodological ethnography, the authors position it as an alternative to other variants of ethnography, that they describe and discuss as ‘naturalistic’, ‘textual’, and ‘bodily’ ethnographies. In ethnomethodological ethnography, as they argue, descriptions are not representations, but serve to actually make phenomenal field properties noticeable to ultimately enable readers to practically re-enact the methodic orderliness of social phenomena, that is, ‘praxeological validity’ (Garfinkel, 2002). For this, ethnographers have to become competent members who are able to identify and actually produce the details of the respective field they study. Ethnomethodological ethnography, thus, provides solutions to problems that have been featured in Ethnography since even before the ‘Crisis of Representation’ in the 1980s, such that sociology as a science is part and parcel of its own object of inquiry, and that social phenomena are always already methodically and practically organized and ordered by its members.

The second paper, ‘Doing ethnomethodological ethnography. Moving between autoethnography and the phenomenon in “hybrid studies” of taiji, ballet, and yoga’ by Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell, explores the specificities of ‘ethnomethodological ethnography’, by outlining why and how textbook-oriented instructions and procedures of ethnography do not suffice. Instead, they discuss what it actually means to ‘put the phenomenon first’ and propose a praxeological re-specification of ‘doing ethnography’ that has to develop from and account for methodological adequacy with regard to particular members’ competencies and the field-specific methodic practices in question. Based on their ethnographic studies of yoga, ballet, and taiji they show, how the description of embodied competencies and detailed analysis of recorded data can mutually elaborate each other in this process. Dealing with cases that hinge upon barely visible embodied phenomena and ephemeral qualities, such as the ‘inner states of consciousness’ or ‘qi’ (life energy), Eisenmann and Mitchell zero in on the often highly ambivalent and problematized notion of autoethnography, by showing its potential merits in describing how these phenomena are made practically instructable and recognizable, that is, socially accountable and as such ethnographically observable. Explicating the difficulties of ‘seeing’ and ‘understanding’ what doing taiji (and yoga) consists of, they elucidate the role autoethnography can play and how diverse notions of self and body feature interactionally in ethnographic research. The paper reflects praxeologically on the importance of an awareness of the social accomplishment of the taken-for-granted nature of embodied work that includes the details and contingencies of oftentimes ‘seen but unnoticed’ (Garfinkel, 1967) local orders.

In the paper ‘Fieldwork, participation, and unique-adequacy-in-action’, Robin J Smith explores the ethnomethodological notion of a ‘unique adequacy requirement of method’ for doing ethnographic fieldwork on a mountain rescue team. Contrary to seeing it as a methodological stipulation or fixed procedure, Smith puts unique adequacy into the midst of the vicissitudes of social affairs, where participants as well as researchers need to be able to adjust their methods in accordance with the contingencies of actual situations at the worksite. Based on his ethnographic participation and detailed transcripts, Smith describes a ‘tutorial problem’ (Garfinkel, 2002) of the rescue team, specifying just what issues, communication problems, and solutions are accountable methods for the members. Thereby, he explicates his own hybrid status as a ‘member’, ‘observer’, and ‘analyst’, categories that Smith ultimately suggests can be re-specified and empirically explored within social practices, instead of reifying them a priori or a posteriori as is often done. In this vein, the paper also reconsiders embodied competencies not as fixed typifications, but as descriptions of the ‘methods and moments in and through which competency is assessed at the worksite, within the temporal flow of activities’. His empirical descriptions of the social organization of a mountain rescue team demonstrate, how unique adequacy can be seen as an ongoing accomplishment that is observable and accountable for members and researchers alike. The paper explicates Smith's actual ethnographic engagement, whilst simultaneously elucidating what has been called the ‘radicality’ of Garfinkel's later writings – that insist on empirical detail and specificity in the midst of actual everyday contingencies.

Instead of asking how researchers can become uniquely adequate in expert practices under study, Emily Hofstetter in her paper ‘A novice inquiry into unique adequacy’, turns the question upside-down, asking how adequacy may be contested, when studying novices and their specific problems that hinge upon an actual lack of competence. She argues that novice troubles and issues may easily be overlooked, once one has become competent in a practice. In so doing, Hofstetter also addresses the multitude of competencies within diverse settings, opening the door for asking which and whose competencies are of relevance. Positioning the issue not only as a researcher's but also as a members’ problem, the paper shows how in her research, competencies can become contested, for example, when – in her second empirical case of climbing – different kinds of expertise (climbing and physiotherapy) are in play; or when an expert cannot re-produce a novice's problem; or when neither party may be considered the expert or the novice in the first place, as in her first field-site at a Member of Parliament's constituency office. The issues Hofstetter raises in her detailed discussion of the ethnomethodological unique adequacy requirement relate to crucial questions of familiarity and distance in ethnography and allow for a re-specification and documentation of an anti-essentialized positionality that stands at the center of contemporary discussions in ethnography. The paper's treatment of adequacy thus also opens avenues for considering marginalized or diverse social orders, as she suggests, for example, in the study of race in interaction (Rawls and Duck, 2020), in which the lack of awareness of White Americans reproduces the issues at hand. Similarly in other fields of marginality, such as disabilities, questions of competence are contested and diverse, calling for a detailed empirical consideration of unique adequacy, as Hofstetter suggests.

With the paper ‘Secondary ethnographic analysis: Thinking about things’, Alex Dennis argues for more open analytical and empirical discussions within EMCA that can build on ethnographic studies and materials. In opposition to a tendency to rely almost exclusively on audio and/or video recordings, or even to standardized ways of doing ethnography, Dennis takes up the cudgels for more creative and imaginative ways of dealing with various empirical materials. Discussing Garfinkel's ambivalence with regard to ethnography as well as Sacks’ take on the issue, and following the latter's injunction to ‘see where things go’ when doing analysis, Dennis proposes to use ethnographic analysis as a resource for ethnomethodological work. The author illustrates this argument based on Andersons’ (1978) categorizations of ‘regulars’, ‘wineheads’, and ‘hoodlums’ frequenting a liquor store in his seminal ethnography: ‘A place on a Corner’. Dennis reframes and respecifies these categories and their symbolic interactionist background, with a typology that aims to shed light on the moral status and internal logics of classifications which depend on whether these are consistent with or deviate from self- and other-categorization. Thus, highlighting potential avenues for more diverse use of empirical materials and conceptual reflection in ethnomethodological studies.

The final paper, ‘Ethnography in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis: Both, neither or something else altogether’ by Anne W Rawls and Michael Lynch, can be read as a conclusion to this volume, since it brings together many of the previously discussed relationships in their details. The paper argues that, despite some ambivalence and a tendency to disavow ethnography, EM and CA have depended upon ethnographic understanding and used ethnographic procedures since the beginning. The paper outlines the very distinctive features and ways in which this is the case within EMCA studies that they also position in contrast to more traditional or conventional ethnography. Understanding ethnography loosely as an approach to describing the social world from the ‘member's point of view’, they highlight that just how this point of view is accounted for can differ greatly. The authors identify a crucial distinction between approaches that reduce, abstract, or generalize ‘data’ into codes, concepts, taxonomies, etc., contrasting those with EMCA and other forms of ethnography that aim at explicating the situational, embodied, and reflexive features of interaction, thus focusing on the details of cooperative and sequential accomplishment of social order, meaning, and identities. Based on a broad variety of EM and CA studies, early research by Garfinkel and Sacks, and their own extensive empirical work, they show how EMCA analysts ‘respecify the place of ethnography in, of, and as, the production of social activities’. This also involves ‘displaced and ambivalent uses of ethnography’ that are always depending on ‘endogenous ethnography’, that is, the methods members use to identify and account for the social world in their everyday practices in the first place, which is the central concern for EMCA. Rawls and Lynch describe ways in which ethnographic understanding can be gleaned from the data, further elaborate ‘analytic’ and ‘praxeological ethnographies’, and finally tackle issues of social categorization in professional settings as well as in everyday life. When explicating how social objects are achieved in the first place, they also show why doing ethnography from an EMCA perspective cannot be morally neutral and how interactional and embodied troubles as well as marginalized groups are of importance. By broadening the understanding of ethnography and ethnographic procedures; Rawls and Lynch explicate just how crucial ethnography can be for studying social phenomena in their actual lived details.

In summary, this special issue offers a well-balanced range of empirically grounded theoretical reflections that shed light from different angles on the various forms of ethnography as well as their productive relationships with EMCA. As noted at the outset, the collections of papers that developed from the panel series at the ‘Practices’-Conference in Mannheim have been published in two volumes. The first of these emphasized empirical and methodological concerns, addressing, among other things, doing ethnography by members, hybridity, trouble, and critical inquiry, with contributions from Götz Hoeppe (2020), Nozomi Ikeya (2020), Robin Smith (2020), and Philippe Sormani (2020). The two collections can, of course, be read separately, but we are pleased that – as well as forming coherent sets of papers – when read together they cover a significant range of positions, studies, and approaches. They all share a commitment to detailed interactional analysis and working out how uniquely adequate descriptions of social activities can be produced, by using approaches that share a family resemblance to one another. Instead of advancing a single program, these collections aim to show how work that forms part of the ethnographic and ethnomethodological traditions can be seen as a coherent body of studies – displaying a continuous terrain, rather than trying to impose borders. With this, we sincerely hope that both volumes not only contribute to the pressing issues in qualitative research, but also bridge some ancient divisions and animosities in ways that can give ethnographic researchers, especially at the outset of their work some guidance and orientation for good ethnographic work that is of crucial importance.

Since work on this volume commenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, completion has been delayed in large part by matters out of our control, that of our contributors, and the publisher. We are enormously grateful to the people we have worked with during this difficult time for their patience, good humor, and willingness to generate excellent work under far-from-ideal circumstances.