Lynch2025a
| Lynch2025a | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Lynch2025a |
| Author(s) | Michael Lynch |
| Title | Promise and Silence: A Comment on Eric Livingston’s, “Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise” |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Online first, Discovering sciences, Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel, Ordinary actions, Scientific practices |
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| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Human Studies |
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| Pages | |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1007/s10746-025-09803-3 |
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Abstract
In “Ethnomethodology’s broken promise,” Eric Livingston focuses his criticisms on his former mentor, Harold Garfinkel. The “promise” in question was a proposal for ethnomethodological studies of work that Garfinkel articulated in the early 1970s. The proposed studies would describe the day-to-day, moment-to-moment work of participants in various activities, ranging from “naturally organized ordinary activities,” such as forming queues at a point of service and driving in traffic, to highly technical professional practices. Livingston, whose dissertation research was supervised by Garfinkel in the 1970s and early 1980s, completed a study on “mathematicians’ work” that Garfinkel upheld as exemplary. Livingston later collaborated with Garfinkel on studies of work in the “discovering sciences” and of the ordinary work of forming queues. In his “broken promises” article, Livingston begins with criticisms of Garfinkel’s best-known book, Studies in Ethnomethodology, and goes on to criticize a couple of his later writings before focusing on a recent book I edited which was composed of some of Garfinkel’s writings and lectures from the 1980s on the work of the “discovering sciences”. Livingston criticizes Garfinkel for his failure to substantiate the proposals and proposed studies he presents and also criticizes me for editing the recent book without also commenting on its severe methodological limitations. Although I agree with many of Livingston’s criticisms of Garfinkel’s writings, in this response I address what I find most puzzling about those criticisms: Livingston’s silence about his own deep involvement in Garfinkel’s studies of work program. I conclude with a different evaluation of what Livingston presents as a damning failure, which is that Garfinkel’s work is largely programmatic and, whether by failure or design, his lectures and writings leave it for others to work out the substantive implications of his program.
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