Ethnomethodology

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The issues of ‘un-written social laws’ in relation to everyday interaction an interested topic that really made me assess my own everyday interaction. I found that until looking at this I never really considered the fact that as a society we do actually have social rules and regulations in relation to interaction between individuals.

An example that I thought of that gave me a relation between the reading and my own understanding of the topic was an incident that happened within the tutorial during the group presentations. Whilst one of the group members presenting was explaining and presenting her section of the information- the other member walked from the front of the room and sat back in the ‘audience’. He chose a seat directly in front of another student and continued to move seats until it was his time to present his section of the information. Even though it was later pointed out to the class that this was intentional to express what they were trying to convey about the breaking of these codes, the class were given the opportunity to express how this situation made them feel. It was unanimous that the class didn’t (at the time) understand why he would do that and thought it quite rude that he left his partner at the front of the class alone (whilst presenting) and he went and sat back down. This was simply because it is not following the ‘law’ of everyday interaction especially in relation to presentation ‘decorum’.

Garfinkel’s idea of contextualization cues is something that I really could relate to. Basically its where you are presented with a particular situation in a social environment and your brain automatically processes an appropriate response. Obviously sometimes this idea isn’t really put into practice, when people have a ‘foot-in-mouth’ moment and say something that really wasn’t appropriate for the situation. As a whole, however, this concept is really something genius and happens constantly.

Heritage, John. 1984. “The Morality of Cognition.” Pp. 75-102 in Garfinkel and

Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.