Tavory2022

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Tavory2022
BibType INCOLLECTION
Key Tavory2022
Author(s) Iddo Tavory
Title Occam’s Razor and the Challenges of Generalization in Ethnomethodology
Editor(s) Douglas W. Maynard, John Heritage
Tag(s) EMCA, Generalization
Publisher Oxford University Press
Year 2022
Language English
City New York, NY
Month
Journal
Volume
Number
Pages 420–441
URL Link
DOI 10.1093/oso/9780190854409.003.0016
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title The Ethnomethodology Program: Legacies and Prospects
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

This chapter addresses the relationship between ethnomethodology and the attempts to generalize observations in sociology. Garfinkel’s original program was sharply opposed to sociological generalization, precluding any simple inclusion of ethnomethodology into the sociological canon. However, as the author shows, conversation analysis (CA), institutional CA, and ethnomethodology-inspired ethnography provide different routes to generalize findings, while still inspired by Garfinkel’s original position. CA does so by suspending the grounds for generalization while de facto claiming extremely wide generalizability; institutional CA does so by focusing on recurring “institutional fingerprints” that mesh CA patterns with institutionally predefined structures and local pragmatics, and ethnomethodology-inspired ethnography does so by either focusing on institutions, or generalizing what the author calls a space of legibility. The author argues that although ethnomethodology deliberately loses the battle for parsimony in its insistence on the detailed production of orderliness, it is actually much closer to the original notion of Occam’s razor. Instead of assuming that generalizations—whether the researchers’ or the subjects’—have a reality beyond their instantiations, it treats the social world as built of its moments of production.

Notes