Last Updated on September 11, 2025 by Karl Thompson
Ethnomethodology, developed in the 1960s by Harold Garfinkel, explores how people use everyday methods to make sense of and organize their social world. The term itself means “the study of the methods people use,” focusing on how social order is constructed rather than assuming it naturally exists.
Ethnomethodology focuses on understanding the “how” of social life: how people create, interpret, and maintain a sense of order in their everyday lives. Instead of assuming that social structures (like institutions or norms) inherently exist, ethnomethodology investigates how people’s actions make these structures seem real.
Ethnomethodology: Key Points
- Social Order is a fiction. Social Order Isn’t Fixed: Social order is actively created and maintained by individuals through shared practices and assumptions.
- Social patterns are assumed, not proven: Through the ‘documentary method’, people fit details into broader patterns they expect to see, rather than treating each situation as unique. People basically see what they want to see in social interactions, and interpret external events in such a way that confirms their already existing view of the world.
- The job of ethnomethodology is to document the micro-processes through which individuals maintain social fictions.
- Ethnomethodology is well known for its ‘breaching experiments’. Here people deliberately break social norms to highlight the hidden rules that govern everyday life.
- Ethnomethodology criticised structural sociologists for assuming there was such a thing as an external social structure which constrained individuals.
The Origins of Ethnomethodology
In 1967 Harold Garfinkel first coined the term ‘ethnomethodology.’ Roughly translated, ethnomethodology means a study of the methods people use. It is concerned with the methods used by people (or ‘members,’ as ethnomethodologists refer to them) to construct, account for and give meaning to their social world.
Many of the concerns of ethnomethodology have reflected the type of approach developed by Schutz. Schutz, however, did not carry out detailed research into social life; he merely speculated about the nature of society. Ethnomethodologists have applied phenomenological ideas in carrying out research.
Social Order as a Fiction
Ethnomethodologists follow Schutz in believing there is no real social order, as other sociological perspectives assume. Social life appears orderly to members of society only because members actively engage in making sense of social life. Societies have regular and ordered patterns only because members perceive them in this way.
Social order, therefore, becomes a convenient fiction — an appearance of order constructed by members of society. This appearance allows the social world to be described and explained, and so make knowable, reasonable, understandable, and accountable to its members. It is made accountable in the sense that members of society become able to provide descriptions and explanations of their own actions, and of the society around them, which are reasonable and acceptable to themselves and others. Thus, in Atkinson’s study of suicide, coroners were able to justify and explain their actions to themselves and to others in terms of the common-sense ways they went about reaching a verdict.
Two examples can be used to illustrate social order as a fiction
Example 1: Queuing (Standing in Line)
- When people queue at a bus stop, they unconsciously follow unwritten rules about where to stand, who goes first, and how to behave. There’s no formal law enforcing this behaviour—it’s just a shared understanding.
- If someone jumps the queue, others might protest, demonstrating that the “order” is upheld by shared expectations. Without these shared expectations, the queue would dissolve into chaos.
Example 2: Polite Conversations
- In conversations, people take turns speaking and listening. If someone interrupts frequently, it disrupts the “order” of the interaction. This turn-taking system is a shared method that participants use to keep the conversation understandable and respectful.
The Documentary Method: How individuals maintain the fiction of social order
Garfinkel (1984) argued that members employ the ‘documentary method’ to make sense of and account for the social world, and to give it an appearance of order. This method consists of selecting certain aspects of the infinite number of features contained in any situation or context, defining them in a particular way, and treating them as evidence of an underlying pattern. The process is then reversed, and particular instances of action and behaviour are used as evidence for the existence of the pattern. In Garfinkel’s words, the documentary method:
“consists of treating an actual appearance as ‘the document of’, as ‘pointing to’, as ‘standing on behalf of’ a presupposed underlying pattern. Not only is the underlying pattern derived from the individual documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are interpreted on the basis of ‘what is known’ about the underlying pattern. Each is used to elaborate the other.”
An Experiment in Counselling
Garfinkel aimed to demonstrate the documentary method and its reflexive nature by an experiment conducted in a university department of psychiatry. Students were invited to take part in what was described as a new form of psychotherapy. They were asked to summarize a personal problem on which they wanted advice and then ask a counsellor a series of questions.
The counsellor sat in an adjoining room, and the student and the counsellor could not see each other and communicated via an intercom. The counsellor was told to give an answer of either ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Unknown to the student, the ‘counsellor’ was not a counsellor, and the answers received were evenly divided between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ their sequence being predetermined in accordance with a table of random numbers.
In one case, a student was worried about his relationship with his girlfriend. He was Jewish and she was Catholic, and he was worried about his parents’ reaction to the relationship and the problems that might result from marriage and children. His questions related to these concerns. Despite the fact that the answers he received were random and given without reference to the content of questions, and sometimes contradicted previous answers, the student found them helpful, reasonable, and sensible. The other students in the experiment made similar assessments of the counselling sessions.
Indexicality
This experiment can also be used to illustrate the idea of ‘indexicality,’ a central concept developed by Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists. Indexicality means that the sense of any object or activity is derived from its context — it is ‘indexed’ in a particular situation. As a result, any interpretation, explanation or account made by members in their everyday lives is made with reference to particular circumstances and situations.
Thus, the students’ sense of the counsellor’s answers was derived from the context of each moment. From the setting — a psychiatry department — and the information they had been given about the task, the answers were meaningful to them, and they did their best to apply what they had been told. In this way, they understood the counsellor’s responses within the context of limited answers they had received from fellow students in a coffee bar.
Breaching Experiments
Harold Garfinkel conducted “breaching experiments” where he deliberately broke social norms to see how people reacted. He also encouraged other members of society to do the same:
Example: A student went home and acted like a guest in their own house, asking their parents formal questions like “May I sit here?”
Reaction: The parents were confused and upset, showing how much they relied on unspoken assumptions (e.g., that family members behave informally with each other).
These experiments highlight the fragile, constructed nature of social order—when the shared “rules” are broken, the order collapses.
Ethnomethodology and Mainstream Sociology
Garfinkel (1984, first published 1967) argued that mainstream sociology has typically portrayed people as ‘cultural dopes’ who simply act out the standardized directives provided by the culture of their society. Garfinkel stated: “By ‘cultural dope’ I refer to the man-in-the-sociologist’s-society who produces the stable features of society by acting in compliance with the preestablished and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides.”
In the place of the ‘cultural dope,’ the ethnomethodologist pictures the skilled member who is constantly attending to the particular, indexical aspects of situations, giving them meaning, making them knowable, communicating this knowledge to others and constructing a sense and appearance of order. From this perspective, members construct and accomplish their own social world rather than being shaped by it.
The Nature of Social Reality
Ethnomethodologists are highly critical of other branches of sociology. They argue that ‘conventional’ sociologists have misunderstood the nature of social reality. They have treated the social world as if it has an objective reality that is independent of members’ accounts and interpretations.
They have regarded aspects of the social world such as suicide and crime as facts with an existence of their own. They have then attempted to provide explanations for these ‘facts.’
By contrast, ethnomethodologists argue that the social world consists of nothing more than the meanings, interpretations, and accounts of its members. The job of the sociologist is therefore to explain the methods and accounting procedures that members employ to construct their social world. According to ethnomethodologists, this is the very job that mainstream sociology has failed to do.
Criticisms of Ethnomethodology
Alvin Gouldner (1971) poured scorn upon ethnomethodology for dealing with trivial aspects of social life, and for revealing things that everybody knows already. He gave an example of the type of experiment advocated by Garfinkel. An ethnomethodologist might release chickens in a town centre during the rush hour, stand back and observe as traffic was held up and crowds gathered to watch and laugh at police officers chasing the chickens.
Gouldner goes on to explain that Garfinkel might say that the community has now learned the importance of the hitherto unnoticed rule at the basis of everyday life: one does not pursue chickens in the street in the midst of the rush hour.
More seriously, critics have argued that the members who populate the kind of society portrayed by ethnomethodologists appear to lack any motives and goals. As Anthony Giddens (1977) remarked, there is little reference to “the pursuance of practical goals or interests.” What, for example, motivated the students in Garfinkel’s counselling experiment?
Signposting
This post is part of a wider set of action-oriented perspectives. Visit my Social Action Theories in Sociology hub for summaries of Weber, symbolic interactionism, labelling theory, Goffman, and interpretivism, helping A-level students compare and revise key social action theories.
This is one of the main sociological theories, not so much part of A-level sociology, more likely to be relevant to undergraduate degree level sociology.
Key text: Garfinkel, H (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology
You can find out more about Garfinkel in this Wikiepedia article.