“Examine ethnomethodological and phenomenological perspectives as critique of positivism” (2017)
- Alfred Schutz and Harold Garfinkel built the two most radical non-positivist perspectives in sociology — phenomenology and ethnomethodology respectively — and both aimed their fire at the same positivist assumption: that social reality exists externally, ready-made, waiting to be measured.
- Both traditions refuse to treat social order as a fact to be explained by external causes and instead treat it as something continuously produced by members through their own meaning-making — a shared move that makes them a natural joint critique of positivism even though they diverge sharply in method and emphasis.
- This answer examines what the two perspectives share as a critique before drawing out where they part company.
The Shared Critique — Order as Constituted, Not Given
- Positivism, following Durkheim’s instruction to treat social facts “as things,” assumes social reality is external to and independent of the individuals living within it — an object the sociologist can observe from outside, the way a natural scientist observes matter.
- Both phenomenology and ethnomethodology reject this at the root: for them, what positivism calls a “social fact” is not a pre-existing object at all but an ongoing accomplishment of the very actors positivism treats as passively determined by it.
- Both therefore relocate the object of sociological study — not the causes of behaviour, but the methods by which people themselves construct and sustain a world that appears solid and factual to them.
- Both make what positivism dismisses as unscientific “common sense” into the central topic of investigation, rather than an obstacle to be eliminated before real science can begin — precisely inverting Durkheim’s instruction to eradicate prenotions.
- Both therefore reject positivism’s ambition to build general causal laws predicting behaviour, since meaning-making is held to be too context-bound and reflexively variable to yield law-like regularities.
Phenomenology — Schutz’s Philosophically Grounded Critique
- Schutz’s starting point is philosophical: he fuses Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology — the bracketing (epoche) of everyday assumptions, and the concept of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the taken-for-granted world all inquiry, including science, presupposes but cannot itself examine — with Weber’s sociology of meaning.
- His central objection to Weber, and by extension to any positivist-adjacent account, is that invoking “subjective meaning” is not enough unless one explains how meaning is constituted and how it comes to be shared between actors at all.
- His answer: humans operate in a natural attitude, taking the existence of a shared world for granted, and navigate it using typifications — standardised, recipe-like categories drawn from a “stock of knowledge at hand” built up through a lifetime of socially transmitted experience.
- Social order is possible because actors assume a reciprocity of perspectives — that others broadly share their typifications and would see the world similarly from an equivalent position — an assumption, not an empirically verifiable fact, which positivism’s search for objective external structure cannot accommodate.
- He distinguished “because-motives” (looking backward, explaining an act by the actor’s past) from “in-order-to motives” (looking forward, to a projected future act) — a finer-grained account of meaningful action than positivism’s search for prior external causes allows.
Ethnomethodology — Garfinkel’s Empirically Grounded Critique
- “Social order is a practical accomplishment, not a fact to be explained.” — Harold Garfinkel
- Where Schutz worked out the philosophical structures underlying meaning, Garfinkel turned the same insight into an empirical research programme aimed directly at the practical methods (“ethno-methods”) ordinary members use, moment to moment, to produce a sense of orderly, factual reality.
- Central concepts: indexicality — the meaning of any utterance or action depends irreducibly on its immediate context, so meanings cannot be fixed once and for all the way a positivist variable requires; reflexivity — descriptions of a situation are themselves part of what constitutes that situation, not a neutral report on it; and the documentary method — members interpret any particular appearance as evidence of, or “documenting,” an underlying pattern they assume to exist, and then use that inferred pattern to make sense of further appearances, in a circular but entirely ordinary reasoning process.
- His signature technique, breaching experiments, deliberately violated everyday taken-for-granted expectations — such as a researcher behaving like a stranger in their own family home — to expose, through the visible confusion and repair-work that followed, the normally invisible methods members use to sustain a shared sense of normal, orderly reality; the breach makes visible exactly what positivism’s smooth statistical categories take for granted.
- His famous jab at Talcott Parsons’ structural-functionalism — that its passive, rule-following individual is a “cultural dope” — crystallises the critique: positivist-leaning macro-sociology treats members as mere executors of external norms, whereas ethnomethodology insists they are continuously skilled producers of the order that appears to constrain them.
- The method retains contemporary relevance well beyond its 1960s origins — recent methodological work has revived breaching-style exercises as a teaching and research tool for exposing the tacit norms structuring digital classrooms and online interaction, precisely the kind of newly emerging, taken-for-granted order ethnomethodology is built to make visible.
Where They Diverge
| Phenomenology (Schutz) | Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) | |
|---|---|---|
| Orientation | Philosophical — structures of consciousness, the lifeworld | Empirical — observable practices, breaching experiments |
| Central question | How is intersubjective meaning possible at all? | How do members practically produce a sense of order? |
| Method | Conceptual analysis of typification and motive | Fieldwork, conversation analysis, deliberate disruption |
| Relation to positivism | Displaces positivism’s causal question with a constitutive one | Empirically demonstrates positivism’s categories are member-made |
- Schutz’s project remains largely theoretical — clarifying the philosophical preconditions of social science itself — while Garfinkel’s is programmatically empirical, generating fieldwork and experimental techniques that can be applied to any concrete setting, from a courtroom to a hospital ward.
- Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology can be read as phenomenology operationalised — it takes Schutz’s abstract claim that reality is constituted through typification and turns it into a method for observing that constitution actually happening.
Conclusion
- Together, phenomenology and ethnomethodology mount the most thoroughgoing non-positivist critique available in sociology — not merely disputing positivism’s findings but rejecting its founding assumption that social order exists externally, waiting to be measured.
- Their shared insight — that order is member-produced, not member-imposed — has outlasted the specific 1960s-70s debates that produced it, continuing to shape how sociologists study digital interaction, institutional talk, and everyday taken-for-granted practice today.
- The two perspectives are best understood as complementary rather than identical: Schutz supplies the philosophical foundation for why meaning cannot be treated as an external fact, and Garfinkel supplies the empirical method for observing, in real settings, exactly how members do the work positivism assumed was already done for them.