Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology

Phenomenology:

Is a method in philosophy that begins with the individuals and his own conscious experience and tries to avoid prior assumptions, prejudices, and philosophical dogmas.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who was the first to use the term phenomenology, defined it as interest in those things that can be directly apprehended by one’s senses. The essential point about phenomenology: it denies that we can even know more about things than what we experience directly through our senses.

Phenomenological sociologists consequently see the task of sociology as describing precisely how we see the world, although they emphasize that our perceptions are molded intrinsically by our concepts. They also examine the ways we come to have similar perceptions to those of others- how we put together the phenomena we experience in such a way that we all construct a similar or shared everyday world.

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) incorporated Weber’s concept of subjective understanding. For Schutz, the meaning that the individual impacts to situations in everyday life is of prime importance, he defines the situation includes the assumptions that individuals draw on a common stock of knowledge, that is, social recipes of conceptions of appropriate behavior that enable them to think of the world as made up of types of things like books, cars, houses, clothing, and so on.

Schutz’s stock of knowledge is similar to Mead’s generalized other. Schutz views individuals as constructing a world by using the typification or ideal types passed on to them by their social group.

Ethnomethodology

Is a study of member or people’s method of making sense of their social world. Harold Garfinkel disagrees with Durkheim’s view that social facts have objective reality, and are out there somewhere. Instead, Ganfinkel says, ethnomethodology sees the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment of the concerned activities of everyday life. In everyday situations individuals invoke or recognize social facts, such as taken-for-granted norms and values, that interpret the meanings of situation for them. When they make sense of the situation by recognizing implicit social norm, individuals are constructing social reality.

Ethnomethodological studies is to analyze everyday activities as member’s methods for makings those same activities “visibly rational and reportable for all practical purpose”, that is “accountable” as organizations of commonplace everyday activities.

Essentially, ethnomethodology denies the functionalist’s suggestion that social facts have a reality of their own that impinges on individuals. It studies the process by which people invoke certain taken-for-granted rules about behavior with which they interpret an interaction situation and make it meaningful. The interpretive process itself is a phenomenon for investigation.

For functionalists, norm and values are out there, explicit, acting on the individuals;
For symbolic interactionists, norms and values emerge from the interaction process;
For ethnomethodologists, the origin or norms and values is not of primary interest, but the process by which human being interact and prove to each other that they are following norms and vales.