Table Of Content

PHENOMENOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Current Continental Research is co-published by The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, Inc. EDITORIAL BOARD Lester Embree Chairman Duquesne University Edward G. Ballard Algis Mickunas Tulane University Ohio University David Carr J. N. Mohanty University of Ottawa Temple University Jose Huertas-Jourda Wilfred Laurier University Thomas M. Seebohm Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Joseph J. Kockelmans Mainz The Pennsylvania State University William McKenna Richard M. Zaner Miami University Vanderbilt University The technical editing of this volume was performed by James H. Wilkinson, M.A., with Dr. Bernd Dorflinger, Achim Koddermann, M.A., Thomas Stoelger, and Olav Wiegand. CURRENT CONTINENTAL RESEARCH 215 George Psathas PHENOMENOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Theory and Research 1989 Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America, Washington, D.C. Copyright © 1989 by The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. University Press of America®, Inc. 4720 Boston Way Lanham, MD 20706 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Co-published by arrangement with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Psathas, George. Phenomenology and sociology : theory and research I George Psathas. p. em. - (Current continental research; 215) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Phenomenological sociology. 2. Ethnomethodology. I. Title. II. Series. HM24.P83 1989 301--dc19 89-30280 CIP ISBN 0-8191-7388--6 (alk. paper) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39 .48-1984. DEDICATION TO IRMA WHOSE LOVE SUSTAINED ME v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ..•.....................•......................•............•.... .ix PART I- THEORY 1. INTRODUCTION : PHENOMENOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY .......... ! 2. ETHNOMETHODS AND PHENOMENOLOGY .........•.............. 21 3.REFLECTIONS ON SCHUTZ ..•....................................... 37 4. ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION ..... 53 5. ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES ........................... 79 6. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE WORLD OF EVERYDAY LIFE ................................................ 99 PART II - RESEARCH 7 .THE EXPERIMENTAL REALITY: THE COGNITIVE STYLE OF A FINITE PROVINCEOF MEANING ............................... 117 8. MOBILITY, ORIENTATION, AND NAVIGATION: CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS ........ l33 9. THE STRUCTURE OF DIRECTIONS ................................ l51 10. ORGANIZATIONAL FEATURES OF DIRECTION MAPS ......... l71 APPENDIX ............................................................... l85 REFERENCES ........................................................... 195 INDEX OF NAMES ...................................................... 211 INDEX OF TOPICS ...................................................... 213 VII PREFACE For the past twenty years I have been wntmg about phenomenology and ethnomethodology as these two perspectives have influenced the Social sciences, particularly sociology. I have tried to do more than programmatic and theoretical studies and have, in addition, both in my writing and teaching undertaken to demonstrate the significance of these perspectives for empirical research. · This book represents an effort to bring together these various writings, which have appeared in various places, as one sustained study. Since the impact of these perspectives continues to reverberate in sociology there is no final definitive statement possible which would provide an assessment of the significance and sustained importance which they have had and continue to have: It is my hope that these studies will contribute to an understanding of these developments and to an appreciation of the relevance of phenomenology and ethnomethodology for the human sciences. My first contacts with phenomenological ideas began when I read George Herbert Mead as a graduate student at Yale in the 1950's. My early training was a mixture of social anthropology, in which the effort to understand the diversity of human cultures was paramount, and positivistic empirical sociology in which the effort was to operationalize concepts and test hypotheses through carefully designed research (including laboratory studies). Thus, in graduate school, I had had no training or course work in philosophy nor was I encouraged to receive any. In fact, one of my advisors had told me that I should not waste my time reading Mead because he was a philosopher and not a sociologist! My first teaching position at Indiana University brought me into greater contact and familiarity with the symbolic interactionist perspective in social psychology and sociology. This body of thought drew extensively from Mead as well as Charles Cooley and John Dewey. However, no direct reading of these original sources was ever recommended by the authors of texts drawing on these philosophers. Since I was to teach a course in social psychology in which my colleague Alfred Lindesmith's book was to be used as a text, I became even more familiar with the symbolic interactionist perspective and its focus on language, symbols, communication, ix X PHENOMENOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY meaning and emergent processes of interaction. In empirical research I undertook to develop tests of hypotheses derived from Georg Simmel's work on dyads and triads in laboratory social psychological experimental studies. During the course of this work I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of explicit attention to emergent social processes in interaction and the inability or unwillingness of experimental and positivist methods, which focused on outcome rather than process and on measurement rather than understanding, to attend to the complexities of meaning. At about that time (1960) I was introduced to a paper by Harold Garfinkel by one of my colleagues. Influenced by Garfinkel's work I designed a laboratory experimental study in which the constitutive rules of a game could be studied as they were disrupted. This study proved to be too difficult to carry through to completion but I realized that Garfinkel's approach represented both a powerful critique of the methods I had heretofore been using as well as an opening to the study of the complexities of everyday interaction. One of my graduate research assistants, David Sudnow, left Indiana to continue his graduate work at Berkeley and maintained contact with me. He informed me of Garfinkel's most recent work and of the work of Harvey Sacks (then also a graduate student at Berkeley) and a group of persons calling themselves ethnomethodologists. I left Indiana in 1963 to move to Washington University but had taken a leave of absence in 1961-62 to study at Harvard. That year led me more deeply into studies of interaction processes using computer assisted systems for analyzing the content of communication. This work proved to be a digression and I became increasingly critical of the positivistic assumptions on which it was based. In 1963, during a summer at Colorado University, I became acquainted with Ed Rose one of the original members of the ethnomethodology seminar. He provided additional access to Garfinkel's thought but it was not until 1964 when the paper "Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities" appeared that I became better acquainted with the names of Alfred Schutz and Edmund Husser! through Garfinkel's footnotes. I had then moved to Washington University in St. Louis (1963) where Herbert Spiegelberg was also teaching. I began to read Schutz .and Husser! more extensively as well as receiving an introduction to Merleau Ponty's thought via his recently translated Phenomenology of Perception. I met and became a friend and colleague of Herbert PREFACE xi Spiegelberg and learned of his summer workshops in phenomenology. In 1966 and 1967 I attended these workshops and met many phenomenologists. These contacts gave me the rare and exciting opportunity to study and discuss philosophical issues. to meet many of the younger phenomenological scholars in America -- Richard Zaner, Ed Casey, David Carr and Don Ihde, and to hear presentations by other scholars such as Herbert Speigelberg, James Edie, Alden Fisher, Wolfe Mayes, Eugene Gendlin and Edward Ballard. These workshops were intellectually exciting and rewarding. · My reading of Alfred Schutz (beginning with the first volume of his collected papers) and my wish to bring his work and ideas and the possibility of a phenomenological sociology to a wider audience led to my edited volume, Phenomenological Sociology, published in 1973. Included in this volume were contributions by Zaner, Spiegelberg, Wagner and Wolff. Some of these papers were from a symposium I had organized at the 1971 meetings of the American Sociological Association in Denver where for the first time a panel of philosophers and sociologists discussed the work of Alfred Schutz. I had since moved to Boston University (in 1968) and had begun, at the graduate level, to teach courses in phenomenological sociology, introducing Husserl and Schutz to a number of graduate students over the years. With my colleague, Victor Kestenbaum of the philosophy departm~nt, I organized and coordinated the meetings of the Boston Group for Phenomenology and the Social Sciences. It was this group, which met from 1973-1976, which eventually became the founding board of editors of the journal, Human Studies, subtitled "a journal for philosophy and the social sciences". In the 1970's I began to attend and to participate in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and found in this scholarly society congenial and supportive collegial relationships. Many of the philosophers and human scientists who became members of the editorial board of Human Studies were first met at the meetings of the SPEP. As my interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis developed I undertook, beginning in 1975 at Boston University with my colleague Jeff Coulter whom I had first met at Manchester University and induced to come to Boston, to organize summer institutes and conferences which would bring together leading scholars and researchers in these areas. Our first Institute brought