the interactions which constitute [social]
space, a local articulation within a wider
whole’ (Massey, 1994b, p. 4). Places are
always formed through relations with wider
arenas and other places; boundaries are
always socially constructed and contested;
and the specificity of a place – however defined
- arises from the particularity of interrelations
with what lies beyond it, that come into con-
juncture in specific ways.
A conception of place as nodal points of
connection in socially produced space enables
a non-positivist (seepositivism) understanding
of generality. In this conception, particularities
or specificities arise through interrelations
between objects, events, places andidentities;
and it is through clarifying how these relations
are produced and changed in practice that
close study of a particular part can generate
broader claims and understandings. Such an
approach underscores the fallacies inherent in
notions that concrete studies deal with what is
local and particular, whereas abstract theory
encompasses general (or global) processes that
transcend particular places. This conflation of
‘the local’ with ‘the concrete’ and ‘the global’
with ‘the abstract’ (seelocal-global rela-
tions) confuses geographical scale with pro-
cesses ofabstractionin thought (Sayer, 1991).
Critical conceptions of spatiality are central
to relational comparison – a strategy that
differs fundamentally from one that deploys
ideal types, or that posits different ‘cases’ as
local variants of a more general phenomenon
(Hart, 2006). Instead of comparing pre-
existing objects, events, places or identities,
the focus is onhowthey are constituted in
relation to one another through power-laden
practices in the multiple, interconnected
arenas of everyday life. Ethnographic studies
that clarify these connections and mutual pro-
cesses of constitution – as well as slippages,
openings and contradictions – help to generate
new understandings of the possibilities for
social change. gha
Suggested reading
Chari (2004); Katz (2004); Mitchell (2004).
ethnomethodology An approach to study-
ing social order and practical reason that
discloses how people or ‘members’ produce
everyday situations, deploying concepts that
neither ironicize nor stipulate those found
in situ. The concern is the routine practices
through which situations ‘occasion’ said
members, and vice versa, thus catching the
self-rendering and self-describing of these
situations as exactly what theyarein the imme-
diate flow of their conduct. Attention alights on
the ‘how’ of this conduct – just how the people
involved do what they do – and on recovering
both the ‘skills’ exhibited by members and the
situated, local, changeable ‘orders’ whose‘rules’
they knowingly follow. Ethnomethodologists
resist importing theoretical constructs that
derive from ‘elsewhere’ or are specified at a level
ofabstractionremoved from the situation in
question. They retain a sustained commitment
to the empirical, but reject the taken-for-grant-
edness of ‘social facts’ typifyingempiricistor
positivistsocial science, preferring instead to
ascertain how a supposed ‘social fact’ has come
about, become recognized and then entered the
situated practical knowledge of people in the
grain of their everyday lives. Central here is the
reflexivityof the researcher, not so much
through continually interrogating their own
positionality, but through gauging the ‘how’
of theirownconduct; that is, how they do what
they do themselves when researching as a prac-
tical activity.
Ethnomethodology has intellectual roots in
Alfred Schutz’s constitutivephenomenology
and Erving Goffman’s micro-sociology of the
everyday, both of which have figured in ver-
sions ofhuman geographypost-1970. The
key figures here, though, are: Harold
Garfinkel (e.g. 1967), who declared that the
researcher must learnfrom members ‘what
their affairs consist of as locally produced,
locally occasioned, and locally ordered, locally
described, locally questionable, counted,
recorded, observable phenomena of order’
(Garfinkel and Weider, 1992, p. 186); and
Harvey Sacks (e.g. 1992), who developedcon-
versation analysis(CA), taking seriously the
‘analysis’ that we all do while conversing as
well as the timing, spacing and ‘indexicality’
(the significance of immediate contexts to the
progress) of any conversation. There has been
no concerted attempt to create an ethnometh-
odological geography, although ethnomethodo-
logical ‘policies’ have filtered into the discipline
throughethnographyand also brushes with
the likes ofsymbolic interactionism,actor-
network theory(ant)andnon-representa-
tional theory(nrt).
In various studies – on mobile phone use in
cars,everyday lifein coffee-houses, practices
with pets – Laurier (1998, 2004) has worked
between geography and ethnomethodology,
highlighting how such a position differs from
‘the requirements of the performance of
‘‘doing competent cultural geography’’’
(Laurier, 2001, p. 486). Unlike NRT’sGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 219 1.4.2009 3:17pmETHNOMETHODOLOGY