Experimenting With Social Order: Notes on Some Developments in Ethnomethodology and the New Iowa School

In the 1960s, sociologists began to challenge the dominant structural-functionalist paradigm by imagining alternative sociologies. Interactionist sociologies, such as ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, emerged as theories and methods to investigate social order. When developing ethnomethodology in the 1950s and 1960s, Harold Garfinkel deployed “incongruity procedures,” today often known as “breaching experiments,” to elicit actions that make “observable-and-reportable” features of the social order. A little later, in the 1960s and 1970s, the social psychologist and symbolic interactionist Carl Couch developed a program today known as The New Iowa School that promotes the use of laboratory experiments and audio-visual recordings as principal data to reveal the generic principles of social order. In this paper, I first explore Garfinkel's incongruity procedures and Couch's laboratory experiments, before discussing some of the critical responses to these two interactionist sociologies. I also touch on the relationship of ethnomethodology and the New Iowa School to symbolic interactionism. In the concluding section, I make a case for the re-embedding of both programs within the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and its work to promote and support interactionist research.