Ethnomethodology in Sociology

Principles

The ethnomethodological approach studies what people can do as members of a group, not their individual traits. It is not a conventional sociological theory (Nickerson, 2021). It asks how people make sense of their own world.

Ethnomethodology frames its questions around communal interaction. It asks how people understand their own worlds, rather than imposing frameworks devised by outside social scientists.

Human interaction is enabled by a consensus of shared norms for conduct (Crossman, 2020). These norms hold a society together.

Ethnomethodology assumes these norms are widely shared. Breaking one deliberately reveals both the community’s dynamics and how its members react to the transgression.

Background Expectancies

Garfinkel gave this shared, unstated stock of assumptions a name: background expectancies. These are the small, usually unconscious assumptions people bring to an interaction, such as how quickly a reply should follow a question. They let each person treat the other’s conduct as sensible without having to ask.

Nobody teaches these assumptions directly.

Background expectancies are not written rules anyone could recite. People notice them chiefly in the moment they are withheld, which is exactly what the demonstrations below are designed to show.

This is why ethnomethodology treats ordinary members as far more sophisticated, tacit reasoners than a casual glance at their behaviour would suggest. That is the whole point. Members generally cannot put the expectancies they rely on into words at all.

Ethnomethodologists say their discipline aims to reveal a society’s behavioral norms even when members are unconscious of them and cannot put them into words.

Examples

A simple conversation between acquaintances follows implicit rules of decorum (Crossman, 2020). Participants nod to show agreement, make eye contact, and take turns asking and answering questions. Nobody states these rules aloud.

Ethnomethodologists uncover these hidden rules by deliberately breaching them. They might refuse to let a vague remark pass unquestioned, or treat a familiar person as a stranger. The disruption itself makes the norm visible.

The account below shows exactly that.

The Polite Lodger: Breaching the Family

Aim: To make visible the tacit rules that organise ordinary family life by breaking them from within. The aim was also to see how family members reacted once the unstated norms were disrupted without warning. Nothing else about the household changed.

Method: Garfinkel had his students spend fifteen minutes to an hour behaving as a polite lodger in their own family home. They stayed formal, addressed relatives by title, and spoke only when spoken to, without telling their families beforehand (Garfinkel, 1967).

What happened next was telling.

Results: Family members did not respond with amusement. Reactions ranged from bewilderment and embarrassment to open anger, and several invented an ordinary explanation, such as tiredness, rather than recognising the breach (Garfinkel, 1967).

Conclusion: The disproportionate distress this small, temporary change caused showed that family life rests on background expectancies members do not normally notice. Withdrawing from an expected role, even briefly, reads as a serious breach (Garfinkel, 1967).

The Trust Experiments: Breaching Ordinary Conversation

Aim: To see how background expectancies stabilise ordinary conversation by testing what happens when a listener stops accepting a vague, formulaic remark at face value (Garfinkel, 1963).

Method: Garfinkel had student volunteers treat a friend’s casual remarks as genuinely ambiguous. They demanded a precise answer to something as ordinary as “How are you?” instead of the expected brief reply.

The reaction was immediate.

Results: Most people reacted with confusion or anger. They treated the demand for precision as a violation of the conversation’s own terms, not a reasonable request, and often accused the student of being rude (Garfinkel, 1963).

Conclusion: Orderly conversation depends on each party tacitly granting a stock of shared background knowledge. Withdrawing it, even over something as small as a greeting, is read as a breach of trust, not a neutral request for clarity (Garfinkel, 1963).

A Real-World Example: Interactional Vandalism on the Street

The same pattern shows up outside the laboratory. It occurs in unscripted interactions between strangers on a city street.

Aim: To explain why men’s attempts to open conversations with unfamiliar women on New York City streets so often broke down into “trouble.” It also asked what these breakdowns revealed about the rules that make street sociability work (Duneier & Molotch, 1999). The setting, this time, was entirely ordinary.

Nothing about the encounter was staged.

Method: Duneier and Molotch examined tape-recorded transcripts of men’s attempts to open conversations with passing women. They analysed the timing, sequencing and pacing of openings, responses, and attempts to close the exchange (Duneier & Molotch, 1999). The recordings caught everything.

Results: The men often kept trying despite clear refusal cues such as crossed arms or a fixed gaze. The women reported feeling threatened by encounters that, word for word, held nothing overtly hostile (Duneier & Molotch, 1999).

The pattern held up.

Conclusion: Duneier and Molotch called this pattern “interactional vandalism.” A less powerful person breaches talk’s smallest, hardest-to-name conventions, producing harm that ordinary language makes difficult to name or challenge (Duneier & Molotch, 1999).

This close, sequential technique for studying talk is called conversation analysis. It grew directly out of ethnomethodology and later gave the naturalistic study of unsolicited public talk its own research programme.

Critical Evaluation

Strengths

Ethnomethodology works well as a descriptive tool at the micro level. It can reveal group dynamics and communal norms that shape social life while usually escaping notice. Deliberately departing from decorum, as in a breaching experiment, is illuminating exactly where norms are hardest to see (Crossman, 2020).

This is what makes the method distinctive among sociological approaches.

The three demonstrations above make the point at three different scales: an afternoon’s changed family role, a single unanswered greeting, and an unscripted street encounter between strangers. No conventional survey question could have produced the same insight.

Only a deliberate breach could, because the people who live inside these dynamics cannot easily put them into words themselves, no matter how directly they are asked.

Limitations

Ethnomethodology cannot explain macro-level phenomena: large-scale institutions and social structures. It avoids normative judgments about whether the norms it studies are good or bad. It has also been criticized for lacking a tenable epistemological foundation (Lynch, 2001). That gap matters.

That means no settled account exists of what would count as valid knowledge within its own terms. Critics have also noted that the approach rarely explains why a community’s norms took the shape they did, or who benefits from arrangements that look, from outside, entirely arbitrary.

The uncertainty compounds.

That question stays open. Without an agreed standard for what counts as valid evidence, findings from different ethnomethodological studies can be hard to compare with one another. They can also be hard to check against any shared external standard at all.

The Triviality Critique

A frequent criticism is that ethnomethodology fixates on trivial interactional detail, such as a withheld reply or a misjudged greeting, at the expense of larger structures of power and inequality.

“It is possible that detailed study of small phenomena may give an enormous understanding of the way humans do things” (Sacks, 1984).

The interactional-vandalism example above gives that reply real weight. Its “trivial” details are exactly the mechanism through which race, gender and class inequality operate in one observable encounter.

None of the demonstrations above explains why a family, a stranger on the street, or a city is organised the way it is. Nor do they say who benefits from that arrangement. A structural or conflict theorist would put those questions first; ethnomethodology, by design, brackets them instead.

Ethical Questions

Garfinkel’s breaching method raises ethical questions that consent-based research does not usually face. The family members and conversational partners whose taken-for-granted world was disrupted did not consent to being drawn into an experiment. By the standards research ethics committees now apply, this kind of study would need substantial redesign.

Consent was never sought here either.

The same problem repeats elsewhere. The women recorded in the interactional-vandalism study did not consent to being research subjects at all. Consent-based research would normally ask each participant to agree in advance and to be told, afterward, exactly what the study involved.

Neither study offered that. The gap between what these demonstrations reveal and how they treated the people inside them is part of ethnomethodology’s own legacy, not a footnote to it.

More recent work moves past this.

Contemporary Research

Since 2015, conversation analysts have extended this same territory: from a single American city into systematic cross-national comparison, and into the public arguments the phenomenon itself now generates online. One study anchors this new work.

Aim: To examine, across several countries and languages, how men’s unsolicited remarks to unfamiliar women on the street are built as pieces of talk. The study asked what these remarks reveal about the background expectancies governing interaction between strangers in public (Bailey, 2017b). The scale alone was new.

That scope invites closer scrutiny.

Method: Bailey analysed 134 recorded instances of men’s unsolicited remarks to young women in public settings, drawn from five countries and four languages. He compared the recurring types of speech act involved, such as greetings and rhetorical questions (Bailey, 2017b). The pattern held everywhere.

Results: The remarks were, on the surface, unremarkable and even polite, but they imposed a level of intimacy on a stranger that ordinary background expectancies do not license. Most women declined to engage at all (Bailey, 2017b).

The women’s own accounts confirmed this.

Conclusion: Street remarks of this kind breach the tacit norms governing interaction between strangers. The language is ordinary enough that the breach itself is hard to name or challenge directly (Bailey, 2017b). That masking is the point.

A companion study examined 1,000 online comments about a widely viewed video of a woman’s walk through a US city, during which she received many unsolicited remarks. Commenters defending the remarks as civil often did so alongside openly hostile comments about the same woman (Bailey, 2017a).

A broader synthesis of how strangers open face-to-face encounters supports the same picture (Pillet-Shore, 2018).

Comparison with Other Paradigms

Ethnomethodology’s assumptions sit close to the opposite of positivism, which treats society as governed by objective, measurable laws. Ethnomethodology denies that social order is simply “there” to be measured from outside; it insists that members produce order themselves, moment to moment. The two paradigms could not differ more.

The approach is usually grouped with interpretivism, alongside symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, but it differs from the standard, Weberian idea of Verstehen, or empathetic understanding.

The contrast runs deep. Rather than asking what an interaction meant to the people in it, ethnomethodology asks how they made it observably, publicly orderly.

A positivist would treat a family’s distress or a stranger’s refusal cues as data to be counted and correlated with other variables. An ethnomethodologist treats how that distress or refusal was actually accomplished, in real time, as the phenomenon itself.

Further Information

• What is Ethnomethodology?
• Attewell, P. (1974). Ethnomethodology since Garfinkel. Theory and society, 1(2), 179-210.
• Heritage, J. (1987). Ethnomethodology. Social theory today, 224-272.
• Linstead, S. (2006). Ethnomethodology and sociology: an introduction. The Sociological Review, 54(3), 399-404.

Real-World Applications

Ethnomethodology’s insights extend well beyond Garfinkel’s original demonstrations, into public policy, online moderation, and education.

Street Harassment and Public Policy

The interactional-vandalism research described above has fed directly into public debate about unsolicited street remarks. It gives campaigners and researchers a vocabulary, background expectancies, imposed intimacy, interactional vandalism, for naming a harm that does not depend on any single remark being overtly threatening.

Municipal and campus safety initiatives increasingly draw on this. The harm of an unwanted approach often lies in breaching an unstated norm about strangers’ mutual obligations in public space, not only in what is said.

That framing has stuck.

The authors argued that these small, mundane encounters and larger patterns of race, class and gender inequality reinforce each other. The fear they generate helps sustain wider social distance between the groups involved, which then shapes how future encounters unfold. That cycle is hard to break.

Online Discourse and Content Moderation

A related application of the same method examines how ordinary people argue about where civility ends and harassment begins online. One study analysed 1,000 comments beneath a widely viewed video of a woman’s walk through a US city (Bailey, 2017a).

The comments split sharply.

People defending the street remarks as civil often posted alongside openly hostile comments about the same woman. Platforms designing content-moderation policy face a similar problem. Harmful talk is often built from ordinary-sounding words, not overtly hostile ones, which makes close, sequential reading of comments a useful complement to keyword-based moderation.

Both readings cannot be true at once, and the juxtaposition itself is telling. It suggests the “just being polite” defence does not really hold up on its own terms at all.

A different setting shows the same thing.

Classroom Talk

The same close attention to how talk is organised has also been applied to classroom interaction. One extended study of an elementary-school classroom, built from a year of videotaped lessons, found a recurring three-part sequence in most classroom talk (Mehan, 1979).

The teacher starts an exchange. A student responds, and the teacher evaluates the response before moving on.

Neither teachers nor students are usually taught this pattern in so many words. It is simply how a lesson is expected to go, a background expectancy as unremarkable to the people using it as the ones Garfinkel’s own demonstrations uncovered.

The lesson recurs everywhere. Background expectancies that nobody states aloud still organise most of what people do together, across policy, platform design and the classroom. Making them visible is what lets institutions respond when those expectancies break down.

References

Bailey, B. (2017a). Greetings and compliments or street harassment? Competing evaluations of street remarks in a recorded collection. Discourse & Society, 28(4), 353–373. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517702979

Bailey, B. (2017b). Street remarks to women in five countries and four languages: Impositions of engagement and intimacy. Sociolinguistic Studies, 10(4), 589–609. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.28020

Crossman, A. (2020). Using ethnomethodology to understand social order. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-ethnomethodology-3026553

Duneier, M., & Molotch, H. (1999). Talking city trouble: Interactional vandalism, social inequality, and the “urban interaction problem”. American Journal of Sociology, 104(5), 1263–1295. https://doi.org/10.1086/210175

Garfinkel, H. (1963). A conception of, and experiments with, “trust” as a condition of stable concerted actions. In O. J. Harvey (Ed.), Motivation and social interaction (pp. 187–238). Ronald Press.

Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall.

Garfinkel, H. (1974). The origins of the term ethnomethodology. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology (pp. 15–18). Penguin.

Lynch, M. (2001). Science and technology studies: Ethnomethodology. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (pp. 13644–13647). Pergamon.

Nickerson, C. (2021). Using ethnomethodology to understand social order. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-ethnomethodology.html

Pillet-Shore, D. (2018). How to begin. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(3), 213–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1485224

Sacks, H. (1984). Notes on methodology. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 21–27). Cambridge University Press.

Williams, J. (2001). Phenomenology in sociology. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (pp. 11361–11363). Pergamon.

Nickerson, C. (2021). Using Ethnomethodology to Understand Social Order. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-ethnomethodology.html

Williams, J. (2001). Phenomenology in Sociology. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 11361-11363). Oxford: Pergamon.