The ethnomethodological approach and conversation analysis

Abstract

The understanding and reasoning of workplace agents are important both to the practice of promoting gender equality in working life and to the approach of Gustavsen's communicative action research. Therefore ethnomethodology is an approach easily applicable to the analysis of gendered interaction. Ethnomethodology is an approach that seeks to investigate people's own sense-making procedures. In social communities, gender becomes visible in the practices of their members. Behaviour deviating from gender-bound expectations makes an individual accountable for his or her actions. Those actions can also be sanctioned. The institution of gender is strongly protected and it is not easily altered. By appealing to nature, cultural matters are made explicable and something that we can be held accountable for. (Heritage, 1996, 188-196) My specific method of analysis is conversation analysis (CA), which is derived from the principles of ethnomethodology. It explores the social organization of activities conducted through talk and action. CA research examines turns of talk and interactional moves in the sequential structures through which particular activities are accomplished. The focus is on people's own sense-making practices as they are revealed in the turn-by-turn unfolding of interaction (Wooffitt 2005). In the studies on institutional interaction, the aim is to discover the unique fingerprint of each institutional practice and to ask how specific institutional tasks, identities and inferences are accomplished (Arminen 2005). It is directly concerned to describe the subtlety and intricacy of communicative processes, and therefore it can offer an account of the operation of power that captures the complexity of actual conduct (Wooffitt 2005). Conversation analysis offers a powerful and rigorous method for exposing the inequalities of social life (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2005; Kitzinger 2005). At first glance from the CA perspective, it appears that choosing gender as a variable is problematic, because the analyst should not be predisposed to hear talk as gendered. This is troublesome for researchers conducting analysis from the feminist stance, because they might hear oppression and power abuse in interaction, although there are no clear signs that the participants orient to them as such. This is, however, exactly what is interesting to Kitzinger. She states that sexist, racist and heterosexist assumptions are routinely incorporated into conversations without anyone responding to them. (Kitzinger, 2002; 57, 72-73)