In his review of my book The Radicalism of Ethnomethodology, Neil Jenkings (Early View) accuses me of engaging in ‘the practice of misrepresentation’, thereby not only alleging that I misrepresented ethnomethodology but also that I intended to do so in order to attack it. He provides no evidence for this, or even that I misrepresented ethnomethodology, he simply asserts it.
Curiously, his definition of ‘ethnomethodology’ – as ‘the study of the methods of members in the situated practices of their on-going activities in the local production of “order”’ (p1) – is very close to the formulations I use in my book. His objection appears to be that I wasn’t as ‘sympathetic’ to ethnomethodology as he would have liked. He claims that my focus should have been on what ethnomethodologists do rather than what they say they do, so that my book ought to have focused on the analytic practices of ethnomethodologists. In fact I do discuss those practices, but I am primarily concerned with the assumptions on which they operate and the rationales for them; and, indeed, some ethnomethodologists have been very forthcoming about such matters, often as part of their criticism of other forms of social scientific work. Jenkings may not like my focus, he may believe that ethnomethodological practice is free-floating and self-validating, and that it involves no presuppositions (a position I address), but he makes no attempt to defend that view. Instead he simply compares what I wrote with what he thinks ethnomethodology is and faults my account because there is a mismatch.
In fact, his whole review falls short of what is required in any review of a book: he provides readers with very little sense of its contents. For example, he mentions that one chapter is focused on Alfred Schutz, but all he says about it is that ‘Hammersley claims most sociologists—including Garfinkel—have apparently misinterpreted’ (p2) Schutz. He does not report that I locate Schutz’s work in the context of Austrian economics and consider whether he intended it as a foundation for or replacement of Max Weber’s sociology. Similarly, Jenkings objects to a criterion I used in assessing ethnomethodological work on the grounds that it is one that I apply to all social science. But he does not tell readers what this criterion is: the capacity to produce knowledge that is more reliable than that from other sources, relating to topics of human relevance or practical value. Apparently, he thinks that ethnomethodological work should not be judged by this criterion, but he does not tell us why.
So, not only is Jenkings’ review libellous – attributing intent to misrepresent on my part in its very title – it is a model for how not to review a book. I am only too well aware that my book has weaknesses, but setting out to misrepresent ethnomethodology was not one of them. I welcome criticism of the book. Indeed, I hoped it would lead to dialogue across boundaries, though I was not optimistic about this given the failure of previous attempts. In a slipshod manner, Jenkings attributes to me a desire for a ‘“singular” disciplinary methodology’, implying by the use of quotation marks that I had used this phrase. But what I actually wrote was that the proliferation of approaches within sociology, and across social science more generally, is out of control; so that we need to work towards clarifying, and if possible resolving, differences. Jenkings may disagree with this. If so, he could have put forward an argument, but instead he offered sneering caricature.
Martyn Hammersley (2018). The radicalism of ethnomethodology: An assessment of sources and principles. Manchester:Manchester University Press.
Neil Jenkings (2019). The Practice of Misrepresentation: On Hammersley’s Straw Man Criticism of Ethnomethodology. Symbolic Interaction (Early View)
