Harold Garfinkel

Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities

In this article, which comprises the second chapter of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel offers conceptual and methodological tools to reveal taken-for-granted, obvious, routine grounds of everyday social activities. According to Garfinkel, the most effective and easiest way to explore how ordinary members of the society produce and recognize the commonly known world of daily affairs is a deliberate breaching of background expectancies we rely on in everyday life. It is background expectancies that provides for the recognizability of routine situations as natural, unproblematic, taken-for-granted. These expectancies constitute what is known as “common sense,” and offer to what is happening its character of reality “known in common with others”. If these expectations are not met (as a result of a special procedure), people begin to make efforts to normalize what is happening, which suggest the sociologist how the daily life in society is organized. Through such breaching experiments Garfinkel shows what are the structural grounds of persons’ common understandings in communication and of systematic manifestations of social affects. Analysis of the results of these experiments allows Garfinkel to argue that ordinary member of the society is not a “cultural dope,” i.e. a puppet that dutifully follows social prescriptions and rules, as traditional sociology tends to picture him or her.

Phenomenal field properties of order in formatted queues and their neglected standing in the current situation of inquiry

In many service lines (here called formatted queues) parties are incessantly busied positioning themselves so as to exhibit the real existence of an order of service. Engaged with the work of producing the order of service audio-visual details are of central and material relevance to the business at hand. The phenomenons staff, called a “local population cohort”, is busied producing the settings distinctive phenomenal field properties of designed enterprises: oriented objects, directional, orientational, positional, place, placement, distanced, facings, rotational, and normal passing looks of things, perspectival, aspects, approaches, inner, outer, and temporal horizontal properties, in and as of embodied visual details of witnessable things. These are produced in accountable coherent technical particulars of the settings immortality, and in just that immortalitys witnessable details, its witnessable generality.