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Research on Language & Social Interaction

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Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, Microanalysis, and the Ethnography of Speaking (EMCA-MA-ES):Resonances and Basic Issues
D. Lawrence Wieder Available online: 22 Jun 2011

To cite this article: D. Lawrence Wieder (1999): Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, Microanalysis, and the Ethnography of Speaking (EM-CA-MA-ES):Resonances and Basic Issues, Research on Language & Social Interaction, 32:1-2, 163-171 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08351813.1999.9683620

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Research on Language and Social Interaction, 32(1&2), 163171 Copyright 1999, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, Microanalysis, and the Ethnography of Speaking (EM-CA-MA-ES): Resonances and Basic Issues

D. Lawrence Wieder Department of Communication University of Oklahoma

The assumptions, background, and conceptual roots of our studies merit special attention. The conventional view regards the seeking of conceptual clarity and explicitness as a characteristic of scientific inquiry and other rational enterprises, desirable in itself and as beneficial to consensus building, to the proper application of logic to candidate propositions, and as an inoculation against the revenge of unnoticed assumptions. Optimism about the possibility of achieving clarity or about its benefits is not the only motive for pursuing it. The investigation projected here is prompted more by the anticipation that the search itself may yield the discovery of new phenomena, reclassifications, new classifications, new dimensions of taxonomies, the need for new concepts, the need for new conceptual boundaries, the resources for new concepts, and other comparable matters. Important theoretical gains have been made in Psychology, Sociology, and Philosophy by inspecting, clarifying, interrogating, and making explicit the unspecified dimensions and unclarified assumptions underlying conceptual schemes.
Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to D. Lawrence Wieder, Department of Communication, University of Oklahoma, Burton Hall, Norman, OK 73019. E-mail: dlwieder@ flash.net

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The conceptual grounds, roots, and intertwining of four related traditions within language and social interaction studies suggest themselves as candidates for such study. These traditions are particularly identified with one of the primary directions of this journal, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and of the language and social interaction divisions of the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association, namely, Ethnomethodology (EM; Garfinkel, 1988, 1996; Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992; Lynch, 1993), Conversation Analysis (CA; Sacks, 1992; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1978; Schegloff & Sacks, 1974), Microanalysis (MA; Goffman, 1959, 1963, 1983), and the Ethnography of Speaking (ES; Fitch & Philipsen, 1995; Hymes, 1962, 1974). These four traditions (hereafter EM-CA-MA-ES) had their origins in departments of sociology and anthropology in the late 1950s and early 1960s. EM-CAMA-ES writings in the 1960s and 1970s (and less so in the 1980s and 1990s) contain an assortment of cross-references between the streams that in many different ways intimate or overtly take for granted the existence of a basic framework and set of assumptions that werein some accounts wholly and in others partiallyshared by two or more of the four traditions.1 Although it is surely the case that some matters of possible agreement within EM-CA-MA-ES are sharply contested, the four nonetheless exhibit the suggestion of a basic substructure through apparent confluences, resonances, and comparabilities in conceptual structures, persistent issues, and assumptions. The fact that the substructure is at least partly tacit invites an exegesis. In view of the brevity of this statement, many points cannot go much beyond a condensed sketch that enumerates and stakes out some of the topics of a comparative clarification. When more fully carried out, these clarifications should produce conceptual enrichment for each stream, should remove some impediments to the suitable appropriation of phenomena and concepts across streams, and, in turn, should assist in the expansion of the domain of each tradition.

THE RESONANCES AND ISSUES Some of the resonances and comparabilities making up the common ground of EM-CA-MA-ES are especially evident when EM-CA-MA-ES concepts are contrasted with those of more traditional approaches, par-

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ticularly with the concepts employed in that experimental social psychology practiced in psychology departments. Although the contrast illuminates matters that initially appear to be resonant, closer inspection turns these resonances into central issues between EM-CA-MA-ES traditions, issues that are (potentially) divisive matters requiring further clarification for EM-CA-MA-ES and each of its streams. Closer inspection also reveals that the features and issues spill over into one another, each leading directly or indirectly to all the othersa particular stance on one issue entails a restricted range of positions on many others. 1. The concepts of prominent conventional schemes in communication, psychology, and sociology (such as motive, goal, attitude, self, personality, relationship, group, organization, and society) represent phenomena as atemporal, self-sufficient, isolatable, independent, propertied substances standing out there over and against engagement with them (Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992; Heidegger, 1962; and Wieder & Georgevich, 1990). These concepts contrast with the overlapping sets of social interactional concepts2 employed in EM, CA, MA, and ES, such as turn at talk, turn in a sequence, lived orderliness, communication practice, speech act, sequence of speech acts, speech activity, conversation, encounters, speech event, social occasion, speech situation, gathering, and the interaction order. 2. The temporal mode of being of the entities projected by such concepts as attitude, personality, and group have a situation-transcending continuing existence that motivates the interpretation of present appearances or events as signs, indicators, or representations of that which continuingly exists. The relatively transient entities referred to by social interactional concepts are creatures of participants actual engagement with something, particularly their engagement with one another as is the case with queues, withs, and conversations. Other forms only require the possibility of mutual monitoring, for example, gatherings come into being as persons come into each others copresence and cease to exist as the next-to-the-last party departs. The spatiality of social interactional things makes the ecology of the setting within which they occur always relevant. This ecology of communicative events invariably bears on what can be attended to, the possibility of mutual monitoring, and boundaries that would prevent it. 3. The traditions of EM-CA-MA-ES take the visible, accountable3 phenomena of communicating themselves along with their circumstances and contexts in their own terms as EM-CA-MA-ESs things, as EM-CA-

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MA-ESs primary thematic phenomena. These things exist only insofar as they function communicatively, as they are visible and recognizable to the participants, and, as EM and CA understand it, as they are thereby visible and recognizable to analysts as well (Garfinkel, 1996; Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1978). These real interactional things are what they are in the way that they are treated: These cultural objects (e.g., a queue or a conversation) will not work, will not subsist, without the mutual orientation and treatment of participants. Although there are differences between EM-CA-MA-ES traditions in specifying the constraints on what counts as a phenomenon,4 the constraints are an issue for each, and each understands that constraints of this sort lead to appropriately conceptualizing phenomena through a species of real (rather than nominal) definitions. 4. EM-CA-MA-ES studies are contextual-structural5 approaches that take interaction or its things, or both, interactions constituent activities, and its context as their units of analysis, sometimes more clearly designated as field (in the sense of phenomenal field) of analysis. These conceptions of units, fields, or objects of analysis markedly contrast with the variable analytic view that the isolatable individual person or organism and its properties are the only imaginable units of analysis sufficiently tractable for scientific inquiry (see Dreyfus, 1990; Heidegger, 1962; Wieder & Georgevich, 1990). Structural-contextual considerations are themes and issues for each stream of EM-CA-MA-ES that have often run over into arguments about context and transcendence and have been a source of difference and talking past one another. An assortment of conceptions regarding the units and/or fields for structural-interactional analysis were put forward by EM-CA-MA-ES authors including Duranti (1988), Fitch and Philipsen (1995), Garfinkel (1988, 1996), Goffman (1959, 1983), Lynch (1993), and Schegloff (1984). Although each put forward a somewhat different view, each was occupied with locating an action or event within an order of affairs that thereby is defined by (and defining of) that action or event. For ethnomethodology, actions, events, or objects are understood as procedurally encounterable by whomsoever witnesses them, and hence are, in the first place and always, objects within a field. Garfinkel (1996) wrote:
In ethnomethodology procedural means labor of a certain incarnate methodological sort: at the worksite progressively and developingly coming upon the phenomenon via the work in and as of the unmediated, immediately and directly observed phenomenal-field details of producing it. (p. 11)

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A simpler portrayal of an object-within-an-order that requires no explanation but that vividly displays the radical contrast between structural and variable-analytic conceptions in another way can be discerned in Goffmans (1959) description of the dramaturgic self as a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented (p. 253). For EM-CA-MA-ES, any proposals concerning the actual, the real, and the real worldly entail the understanding that social interactional phenomena only occur or unfold in situ, their contingencies being (inter)actionally worked out, matters especially vivid in conversations and prizefights. Among the several important consequences of this position is the provision (powerfully formulated in Garfinkels [1996] just-quoted remarks) that the observer (for CA, the observers recorder) must be present to witness the (inter)actional working out of the phenomena. 5. The necessity of paying serious attention to the interactional working out of the phenomena is one more reason that EM-CA-MA-ES studies deflect interest from prediction and causal explanation of social interactional phenomena to explanations and understandings of them by locating them within, and as a coherent aspect of, a structural configuration or contexture. Each stream of EM-CA-MA-ES offers a variant of structural explanation. One of the more radical alternatives to causal explanation was offered by Lynch (1993) in his formulation of a theme from Garfinkels lectures: He provided an account of the coherency of the flow of vehicular traffic as consisting of organized assemblages of action, engineered spaces, equipment, techniques, and `rules of the road . . . These matrices for human conduct . . . provide distinctive phenomenal fields in which organizations of `work are established and exhibited (p. 132). 6. Interactional phenomena are things for direct observation. Public and repeatable observation is the idealan ideal especially insisted on by CA. A core of agreement about the appropriateness of employing qualitative-observational methods of some sort is joined to issues of transcendence and issues of appropriate modes of observational and recording procedures and their groundsissues that have been a source of sharp difference between EM-CA-MA-ES approaches. For example, differences between CA and ES on these issues are featured in Duranti (1988), Schegloff and Sacks (1974), and Zimmerman (1988). 7. The concepts of convention, norm, rule, and instruction play a central role in EM-CA-MA-ES research as topics and objects for description and analysis, implying some involvement with rules theory, though just how rules are to be discovered and demonstrated and what rules do

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do, should do, and can do as sources of explanation and understanding within an analysis remains a source of issues within and between the major streams. Despite differences pertaining to these issues, EM-CAMA-ES approaches do not feature rules in the kinds of causal or quasicausal explanations that the designation rules theory, in relation to laws theory, implies.

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SOME CONSEQUENCES

In view of the finding that most of the apparent resonances and comparabilities between the different streams of EM-CA-MA-ES studies open up (potentially) divisive issues, it is fair to say that notwithstanding its mutual history and shared difference with more conventional views, EM-CA-MA-ES is not silently supported by a single overarching scheme that gathers the four into itself and makes them one. Nonetheless, the four are sufficiently synchronized that proper attention to the dividing issues can be joined to responsible reflective appropriation, a considered (mis)reading (Garfinkel, as discussed in Lynch, 1993, p. 117) of concepts and strategies from one EM-CA-MA-ES tradition by another, ideally accompanied by a review of the yield in the borrowers own terms. In the simplest cases, a concept from one scheme is simply a subtype of a concept of another; for example, conversations in CA are a species of focused gatherings in MA. More complicated appropriations are eased by the phenomenon-locating feature of each EM-CA-MA-ES framework that also limits the potential distortion that often accompanies unreflective appropriations: The phenomena located by each hold themselves out (and are held out by investigators) as commonsensically available phenomena, as phenomena for participants in the first place, and as findable without recourse to specialized methods. Once found, further instances of the phenomena are findable without reference to the analysts conceptual formulation; for example, Goffmans (1963) withs stand on their own with little explicit external conceptual support. Once observed, such phenomena should be congruously available to other EM-CA-MA-ES frameworks. The appropriation of one EM-CA-MA-ES streams methods of object location or phenomena discovery and the conceptual consequences of situating the others objects within ones own scheme is a potential source

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of increasing that schemes scope as well as a source of theoretical stimulation. The attempt to import an alien object into ones own scheme raises issues of the sort suggested by such hypothetical questions as the following: How can culturally recognized speech events be objects for ES and not for CA? Can CA find such objects?6 Although the results of appropriations can broaden the scope of the borrowing tradition and enrich the resources available to it, from time to time, from the standpoint of the lender, the results appear empty. The disclosing of these conceptual resonances and their aspects prepares the ground for an ensemble of EM-CA-MA-ES based ethnographies of interaction, for example, a study beginning with the ethnography of speaking that employs conversation analytic methods and/or treats conversation analytic objects, or an ethnomethodologically based study investigating objects located by microanalysis, and so forth. Doing such studies reflectively is another way to interrogate the assumptive ground of conceptual schemes; indeed, that has been the point of many ethnographically (and quasi-experimentally) based ethnomethodological investigations.

NOTES

1 Many aspects of EM-CA-MA-ESs history are of potential interest to understanding the relations between the four that cannot be treated in this brief essay. 2 Although social interactional concepts predominate within EM-CA-MA-ES, they coexist with noninteractional concepts such as speech community. This coexistence is a likely source of issues not treated here. EM concepts do not fit easily within the list, in part because they often do not directly designate classes of phenomena, frequently taking the form of an adjective or adverb instead of a noun (e.g., reflexively accountable), and in part because they are either immensely general or, as in the cases of the traveling wave and queue, are very specific. 3 For EM, reflexive accountability is named, explicit, and topical (e.g., see Lynch, 1993, pp. 1415), and it is explicit and sometimes named in CA. In Goffmans MA (e.g., 1959, 1963), it is unnamed but explicit and sometimes thematized. In ES, accountability is implicated in conceptions of the emic, but the idea itself is not named or thematized. 4 Hymess (1962, 1974) proposal that his basic conceptual apparatus be understood as analogous to a phonetics displays some of these differences. 5 Structural is meant in the sense that Duncan (1969) used the term to contrast structural with analytic variable approaches.

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6 Also, in what sense or in what form are ESs speech events actually objects for CA? Are there routine and also essential practices involved in locating speech events that CA disavows? This set of questions about CAs possible treatment of the objects and concepts of ES represents one set out of the twelve sets that the course of questioning projects.

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