I took this in a bit of a different
direction but I think it still completely applies to our themes, please consider: in
regards to the video clip. Envision yourself many many years from now being
married and discovering that your wife has cheated on you, it is agreeable that this would
be difficult and hard to understand. How would you make sense of this? Garfinkel would argue that people would try to make
sense of that situation, by behaving the way to do (maybe like the co-workers in the video). People are always producing meaning or stocks
of knowledge and information in order to acquire meaningfulness out of
particular situations.
This can be related to Garfinkel's breaching experiments but we can also attribute this to Gestalts theory of, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This man is trying to fill in information in an unfamiliar situation, “my wife cheated on me, what do I do?” in order to make sense of things. This man has to treat it as an interpretive matter by the process of producing order with this woman (Rawls, 2008, p.702). This is rather interesting because this week’s reading states that the workplace has its own unwritten rules, generally not to be deviant of those rules (Wieder, 1974). Yet, in the video it is clear that we still choose to be deviant. For example, in the video, having sexual relations with a co-worker is usually a do not do kind of rule, but here it seems so casual.
However, it is important to consider that these codes or rules are not regulated; they are constitutive by trying to always ascribe sense to things. There is no such thing as a senseless situation. I really like how this weeks reading from Wieder, "Telling the code," related so very closely to Garfinkel's idea of trying to make a senseless situation in his breaching experiments. I suppose that was my whole point in showing that video... that it contained a sort of theme of both breaching and telling the code.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjZHO1oUrZs
This can be related to Garfinkel's breaching experiments but we can also attribute this to Gestalts theory of, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This man is trying to fill in information in an unfamiliar situation, “my wife cheated on me, what do I do?” in order to make sense of things. This man has to treat it as an interpretive matter by the process of producing order with this woman (Rawls, 2008, p.702). This is rather interesting because this week’s reading states that the workplace has its own unwritten rules, generally not to be deviant of those rules (Wieder, 1974). Yet, in the video it is clear that we still choose to be deviant. For example, in the video, having sexual relations with a co-worker is usually a do not do kind of rule, but here it seems so casual.
However, it is important to consider that these codes or rules are not regulated; they are constitutive by trying to always ascribe sense to things. There is no such thing as a senseless situation. I really like how this weeks reading from Wieder, "Telling the code," related so very closely to Garfinkel's idea of trying to make a senseless situation in his breaching experiments. I suppose that was my whole point in showing that video... that it contained a sort of theme of both breaching and telling the code.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjZHO1oUrZs
References:
Rawls, A W. 2008, “Harold Garfinkel, ethnomethodology and
workplace studies,” in Organization Studies, Sage Publications, Los
Angeles, pp 701-732.
Wieder, D L 1974, “Telling the code,” in R Turner (ed.),
Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, Penguin Education, Harmondsworth, pp
144-172.
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