Evaluative Categories of Action and Identity in Non-Evaluative Human Studies Research: Examples from Ethnomethodology

Tim J. Berard

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.1.1.02

Authors

Tim J. Berard Kent State University, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.1.1.02

Keywords:

description, ethnomethodology, evaluation, Jeff Coulter, discrimination, labeling, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Winch, schizophrenia, suicide

Abstract

Ethnomethodologists have emphasized the pragmatic and contextual nature of description as a variety of social practice, and have suggested the ramifications of this insight for the methodology and philosophy of the social sciences. However, ethnomethodologists have thereby invited difficult questions about the moral and analytic status of their own descriptions. Drawing on Atkinson’s study of suicide verdicts and Coulter’s writings on schizophrenia, ethnomethodological scholarship is shown to display the possibility and promise of disinterested description, even when the subject matter involves the evaluation of problematic actions and identities. The combination of Wittgensteinian logical grammar and empirical studies of natural language use, suggested by Coulter, is presented as especially relevant and remarkable for purposes of studying social practices including describing, naming, categorizing, classifying, labeling, diagnosing, reaching a verdict, and kindred practices of language use conceived as varieties of practical action.

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Author Biography

Tim J. Berard, Kent State University, USA

Tim J. Berard (Ph.D) is an Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Kent State University, Ohio, USA. He has published on issues and figures in social theory with journals including Theory, Culture & Society, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Human Studies, and Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. His current work involves a critical reconsideration of 'labeling' practices and labeling theory in the sociology of deviance and the philosophy of the social sciences, and he is continuing a study of the relations between social practices and social structures with reference to discrimination disputes as socio-linguistic, socio-legal, and social-structural phenomena.

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