🚀 go-pugleaf

It is interesting to see Garfinkel and ethnomethodology invoked
as part of this discussion of rhetoric.  A couple of comments on
this.

First, the so called fake therapist experiment worked by having
participants record their reactions to what they thought was a
trainee therapist giving yes/no responses to questions posed on
an intercom.  The point was to illustrate a number of methodical
ways in which people made sense of these (actually randomised)
responses.  For example, people constantly used their interpretations
of earlier responses to make sense of latter ones, and their
interpretations of latter responses to reconstruct the sense of
earlier ones.  The participants were constantly remaking what went on.

I think it is perhaps misleading to consider this to be about dealing
with error.  Rather than see error as being a simple or neutral fact
that people have to fashion some way of dealing with, Garfinkely I am
sure (almost sure!) would consider error itself to be a method that
people use: the error is not simply there it is done.

A good example of work illustrating this is Michael Lynch's book
Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science (Routledge, 1985).  The
point is that there is no way outside of the participants' interaction
to say what is error what not, so rather than look at situations of
error and see how people deal with it, you look at error accounting as
a phenomena in its own right.

For more rhetorical themes in ethnomethodology, one of the places to
look is Weider's Language and Social Reality (Mouton, 2nd ed in late
80s).  This looks at the use of the 'convict code' in a half way hostel.
Of particular interest are the ways that the convicts use the code to
effect courses of action.  For example, by specifying some action as
against the code a convict can accountably not do it: "I can't organize
a pool tournament, that would be kissing ass".

A number of people at Loughborough have recently found it very
interesting to combine ethnomethodological and rhetorical perspectives
(in a selective way).  See Billig's Arguing and Thinking (1987, CUP),
Edwards et al Ideological Dilemmas (1988, Sage), Edwards and Potter
Discursive Psychology (1992, Sage).

Jonathan Potter
Discourse and Rhetoric Group
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leicestershire, LE11 3TU
UK