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George Psathas: Phenomenology and Ethnomethdology Michael Barber1

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract In some of his writings, George Psathas suggests that Alfred Schutz’s account of social-scientific methodology as constructing ideal types falls short of ethnomethodology’s approach, which, by giving an account of how actors produce their social order, exemplifies a kind of social-scientific following of Husserl’s stipulation that phenomenology return to “the things themselves”. By distinguishing Schutz’s phenomenology of the natural attitude which does return to the things themselves from his account of social scientific methodology, one can conceive various social-scientific methodologies legitimately serving different scientific purposes with reference to the life-world basis, for instance, ideal–typical methodologies that might seek solutions to problems and ethnomethodological methods that capture actors’ production of order and mimic the phenomenological return to the things themselves. Despite delineating this distinction between phenomenology and ethnomethodology, which Psathas too makes, ethnomethodology reveals many of the investigative tendencies of phenomenology and the two can be seen to engage each other indirectly and interactively. Finally, ethnomethodologists maintain some intellectual, relevance-guided distance from the everyday actors they study, however minimal the distance between them and the actors they study may be. Keywords  Ethnomethodology · Phenomenology of the life-world · “To the things themselves” · Phenomenological sociology · Social-scientific methodology · Ideal type construction Psathas (2004) was an acute interpreter of the work of Alfred Schutz, who, he acknowledges, influenced and inspired him. Psathas regularly tried to address carefully the relationship between ethnomethodology, which he, with others, brought to birth, and phenomenology—documenting their similarities and differences. In this brief paper, I will consider an implicit criticism that social science, as Schutz envisioned it in terms of type-constructing social scientists, falls short of returning to * Michael Barber [email protected] 1



Saint Louis University, St. Louis, USA

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“the things themselves, “as (Husserl 1983) felt that phenomenology should do and that ethnomethodologists in fact do. While Psathas never directly states that his version of social science represents a return to the things themselves and that Schutz’s does not, he does state that in ethnomethodology’s direct examination of the phenomena of how everyday actors together accomplish order, ethnomethodology’s originator, Harold Garfinkel, proves himself “true to his phenomenological roots” (Psathas 1999). Because of ethnomethodology’s concern for the reality of everydaylife-as-seen-by-men-in-society and for the way that such people perceive and understand the social reality they live in, Psathas (1972) asserts, “This represents, in a real sense, I believe, a phenomenological position of ‘going to the t