Revision summary
Positivism measures external facts; these perspectives study meaning and members’ methods. Schutz described the everyday life-world of typifications. Garfinkel showed order as accomplished, indexical work. Berger and Luckmann treated institutions as objectivated meanings. The critique qualifies rates; it does not delete official files.
Model answer
Introduction
Positivism treats social life as measurable external facts. Phenomenology and ethnomethodology answer that order is accomplished in meaning and in everyday methods. The critique is of a science that skips the actor’s world.
Body
Phenomenology against a thing-like society
- Alfred Schutz asked how the everyday life-world is constituted in typifications, not only in variables.
- Edmund Husserl’s bracketing, used sociologically, suspends the taken-for-granted so that meaning can be described.
- Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann showed that institutions are objectivated meanings, not natural objects waiting for a census cell.
Ethnomethodology
- Harold Garfinkel studied the methods members use to produce a sense of fact. Breaching experiments showed how fragile “obvious” order is.
- Indexicality and reflexivity mean that talk and rule are completed in the situation. A positivist codebook cannot fully freeze that work.
- Conversation analysis later showed turn-taking as organised practice, not residual noise.
What the critique does not do
- It does not abolish rates. Durkheim’s suicide files still exist. It refuses to treat those files as innocent of office meaning.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD POS[Positivism external facts] --> SKIP[Skips meaning] PH[Schutz phenomenology] --> LW[Life-world] EM[Garfinkel ethnomethodology] --> MET[Members methods] LW --> CR[Critique] MET --> CR
Conclusion
Phenomenology relocates the object in the life-world. Ethnomethodology studies how members make that world accountable. Together they criticise positivism’s skip from behaviour to variable without the actor’s methods.
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