Meyer2025
| Meyer2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Meyer2025 |
| Author(s) | Christian Meyer |
| Title | Alfred Schütz, Aron Gurwitsch, and Harold Garfinkel: The Phenomenological Origins of Ethnomethodology |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Alfred Schütz, Harold Garfinkel, Aron Gurwitsch, Phenomenology |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| Pages | 105–114 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-10 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 8 |
Abstract
The importance of Alfred Schütz’s mundane sociology of the lifeworld for the development of Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology cannot be underestimated. Garfinkel was in contact with Schütz in the years when he wrote his Ph.D. thesis in Harvard, exchanging letters and travelling to New York frequently to meet with him. Several of Schütz’ elaborations of Weber’s theory of action and of his criticisms of Parsons’ action frame of reference were used by Garfinkel to develop a “sociology of everyday-life” as alternative to contemporary sociology still anchored in the unity of science approach. In particular, Garfinkel’s proposal that a “sociological attitude” is required to produce “adequate” descriptions of the social world as experienced by actors is inspired by Schütz. It is from Schütz that Garfinkel borrowed the term “natural attitude” that inspired his notions of “the world of daily life” and “common sense understandings”. Garfinkel further elaborated Schütz’s work so that it became usable as a source of methodological reflection in sociology. Equally from Schütz stems Garfinkel’s notion of rationality as—in many of its dimensions—actor’s postulate rather than abstract, eternal principle. However, alongside Schütz, Aron Gurwitsch deserves mention too. Drawing inspiration from Aron Gurwitsch’s philosophical elaboration of the perception of phenomenal fields, Garfinkel came to explore how the witnessable and recognisable properties of social phenomena, or “things”, come together in an indexical gestalt coherence. Thus, orientedness towards goals, means, and circumstances, phenomena Parsons had posited in his “action frame of reference”, were re-specified by Garfinkel as being perceptually and interpretively open and not deterministic or rule-bound. Garfinkel, who regularly met with Gurwitsch in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1946 until he left for Los Angeles in 1951, treated Gurwitsch’s challenge to develop descriptive accounts of practical meanings and action and their coherence in “figural contexture” in empirical detail as a foundational point of departure for ethnomethodology. It has been used as ethnomethodology’s key resource in its concern to specify what Garfinkel calls “the problem of meaning”, i.e. the question of how meaning can be understood and socially shared, the point at which the influence of Schütz and Gurwitsch dovetail.
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