LANGUAGE, ACTION, BEWILDERMENT!

PROBLEMS OF IDENTITY AND RESEARCH

STRATEGY

Martyn Hammersley

The Open University

The Case of Linguistic Ethnography

Linguistic versus what?

Ethnography versus what?

• Linguistic ethnography versus a Vygotskian sociocultural approach?

• Linguistic ethnography versus discursive psychology?

• Linguistic ethnography versus conversation analysis?

• Linguistic ethnography versus critical discourse analysis?

Obscure Language: Garfinkel

‘Chapters One to Nine […] bring out from a background of textual foliage that is their source in tub files of documents, central practices of EM’s program as the program’s incessant concerns with a recurrent figure in that foliage, namely, procedures of order production specified as members’ methods. Members’ methods in accountable specifics of instructed actions display a fourth orderliness.’

(Ethnomethodology’s Program, 2002,p69)

Obscure Language: Foucault

‘Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this “more” that we must reveal and describe’ (The Archaeology of Knowledge, p49)

Identity as substantial self

In Social Identity, the anthropologist Richard Jenkins defines ‘self ’ or 'identity' as: ‘each individual’s reflexive sense of her or his own particular identity, constituted vis-a-vis others in terms of similarity and difference, without which we would not know who we are and hence would not be able to act’ (Jenkins, 1996: 29–30)

Identity as discursively formulated ‘Sacks’ general concern was with how

conversational participants use descriptive categories of this kind [identity categories], and apply membership criteria, as a way of performing various kinds of discursive actions. His approach contrasts with how such categories figure in other kinds of social science, as analysts’ categories of people, according to which the analyst offers explanations of what they do, of what they say, and how they think’

(Edwards in Antaki and Widdicombe 1998, p15)

Two Conflicting Proposals and Two Dilemmas

Some questions1. Can fieldnotes be a legitimate form of

data?2. Can interviews be an acceptable source of

data? 3. What is context?4. Should the focus of analysis be on

discursive practices, social strategies, or institutional facts?

5. Should analysts attribute identities, intentions, etc?

6. How self conscious must we be about our own language use as analysts?

Fieldnotes and Transcripts• Must we always have electronic recordings, or

can we rely upon fieldnotes?

• What sort of recordings do we need: an audio recording machine placed in the corner of the room or all the participants miked up?

• Should we use video recordings?

• Do we always have to transcribe recordings?

• And, if we do, must these transcriptions include the sort of detail that is to be found in the transcripts used by many linguists and conversation analysts?

A View from Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis

‘Of course, visual data has various analytic affordances and limitations, but ethnomethodological studies of situated action now regularly, though not necessarily, use these forms of data capture. One reason for this is that reliance on purely audio accounts is of limited use for the multi-modal description of interaction in face-to-face interactions and/or [to study] the use of technologies and artefacts’

(Jenkings 2009, pp778-9)

Beware of Angry Sociologist!

References

Edwards,D. (1998) ‘The relevant thing about her: Social identity categories in use’, in Antaki C. and Widdicombe, S. (eds.) Identities in Interaction, London, Sage.

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, Tavistock.

Garfinkel, H. (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program, Lanham MD, Rowman and Littlefield.

Hammersley, M (1980) 'Putting Competence into Action' in MacLure, M. and French P. (eds.) Adult-Child Conversation, Croom Helm, pp47-58. [Reprinted in Hammersley (ed.) (1986) Controversies in Classroom Research, Buckingham, Open University Press.]

Hammersley, M. (2003) ‘Conversation analysis and discourse analysis: methods or paradigms?’, Discourse and Society, 14, 6, pp751-81.

Hammersley, M. and Gomm, R. (2005) ‘Recent radical criticism of the interview in qualitative inquiry’. In Holborn, M. and Haralambos, M. (eds.) Developments in Sociology, Volume 20, Ormskirk, Causeway Press/Edinburgh, Pearson Education, 2005. [Reprinted in Hammersley, (2008) Questioning Qualitative Inquiry, London, Sage.]

Hammersley, M. and Treseder,P. (2007) ‘Identity as an analytic problem: who’s who in “pro-ana” web-sites?’, Qualitative Research, 7, 3, pp283-300.

Jenkings N. (2009) ‘Studies in and as ethnomethodology: Garfinkel and his ethnomethodological “bastards” part 2’, Sociology, 43, 4, pp775-81.

Jenkins, R. (1996) Social Identity, London, Routledge.

Potter, J. & Hepburn, A. (2005) ‘Qualitative interviews in psychology: problems and possibilities’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 2, 281-307.