Date:         Tue, 13 May 97 17:03:22 EDT
From: Alan <DAVIDSON@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU>
Subject:      Ethnomethodology
To: socgrad@CSF.COLORADO.EDU
Message-Id:   <970513.171252.EDT.DAVIDSON@UConnVM.UConn.Edu>
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It is not an issue of concepts used as much as an issue of underlying
assumptions.  Sure, according to Garfinkel the focus should be on
practice and on how "social forces" such as social structure and
culture are implicated through practice -- however, according to
Garfinkel and especially according to the European borrowers of
Ethnomethodolgy, this does not deny that social action is socially
patterned according to the situation.  If anything, symbolic
interactionists only began using culture and meaning systems and the
like after the "astructural" critiques coming from both structural
sociologists and from more structural qualitative theorists such as
Goffman.  If one wants free actors, look at Blumer and some American
Rational Choice theory, don't look at Garfinkel.

      To a certain extent, Garfinkel's point was a trivial one --
the necessities of particular situation (as perceived by actors) often
leads to practice departing from mandated scripts -- but this doesn't
make the mandated scripts irrelevant or completely negotiable (as some
Symbolic Interactionists would have it).  As for a Poststructural
rebellion against Levi-Strauss, there was a critique of Levi-Strauss
within French Social science, but Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard and
company are every bit as deterministic as Levi-Strauss and Durkheim and his
students were -- the vehicle (discourse) is different, but Foucault's social
actors are no freer (even in Giddens' sense of agency) than are Parson's
actors.