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27 - Researching everyday practice: the ethnomethodological contribution

from Part IV - Methodological Resources

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2015

By
Dalvir Samra-Fredericks
Edited by
Damon Golsorkhi ,
Linda Rouleau ,
David Seidl  and
Eero Vaara
Dalvir Samra-Fredericks
Affiliation:
Nottingham Business School, United Kingdom
Damon Golsorkhi
Affiliation:
Grenoble School of Management
Linda Rouleau
Affiliation:
HEC Montréal
David Seidl
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Eero Vaara
Affiliation:
Svenska Handelshögskolan, Helsinki
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Summary

The studies of work [Garfinkel] inspires […] [examine] the detailed and specifiable process of producing orders based on shared methods, trust, competence and attention.

Rawls (2008: 702)

Introduction

Harold Garfinkel originally coined the term ‘ethnomethodology’ in the 1950s to capture his central interest in (for us, organizational) members’ ‘folk’ or everyday taken-for-granted methods (also called practices) or practical reasoning procedures for accomplishing a social order that constitutes sense. Garfinkel (1974: 16) later commented that ‘ethno’ referred, ‘somehow or other, to the availability to a member of common-sense knowledge of his society as common-sense knowledge of the whatever’. While Garfinkel's ‘daunting prose’ (Silverman 2000: 138) may deter us from reading him first-hand, others, such as Heritage (1984), have offered accessible summaries of his work. Garfinkel's ethnomethodological stance was also subsequently taken up in a unique way by Harvey Sacks (see Jefferson 1992; see also Silverman 1998) and colleagues in the late 1960s, establishing conversation analysis. Under the auspices of the ‘missing what’, both Garfinkel and Sacks argued that social scientists were missing out the observable and reportable ‘work’ – in other words, the everyday ordinary activities of members whereby they make accountable and visible those entities we call, for example, ‘welfare agencies’, hospitals, factories, courtrooms, families and various other kinds of organizations/bureaucracies.

In quite diffuse ways, ethnomethodological thinking and ideas have seeped into the management and organization studies field through the work of Weick (1995: 11) and Giddens (1984; see Boden 1991). More recently the social theorist and philosopher Theodore Schatzki (2005: 479) – when detailing the parameters of a practice turn in social theory – has also contended that his ‘site ontology’ is ‘clearly allied with a variety of micro-oriented approaches to social life, for example, ethnomethodology’. When turning to the more general substantive ‘topic’ in this chapter – strategy work – ethnomethodology has also been briefly referred to by Knights and Morgan (1991) in their Foucauldian-based appraisal/critique of corporate strategy and the inherent constitution of subjectivity and other ‘power effects’.

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Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice , pp. 477 - 490
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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