ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the application of a little used sociologically grounded epistemological and methodological approach to tourism studies, that of ethnomethodology (EM) and its related ‘cousin’ conversation analysis (CA). For whatever reasons, these approaches, which through their interconnectedness form an important strand in qualitative sociological research methods, have been overlooked by tourism researchers. There are perhaps many good reasons which we might speculate: the cause of this neglect; the focus of CA on naturally occurring interactional data, something which is perhaps extremely difficult to collect in touristic settings; the often difficult language in which EM was specified by its progenitor Harold Garfinkel; the emphasis on past empirical research from EM/CA on medical interaction and cases; a lack of knowledge on how to use these approaches; but also perhaps, I would argue, the particular emphasis placed from these perspectives upon what ordinary people say and do to accomplish their activities, to make them real, meaningful and relevant to their lives, means that clear ground rules are placed upon the depth of interpretation and abstraction made possible through these approaches about the inner worlds of the observed (tourists) or the speakers (touristic interaction). These restrictions have perhaps been less appealing to analysts of touristic phenomena, a nascent field of study, wherein researchers rightly want to make bold assertions about the phenomena under scrutiny. Indeed EM is often criticised by interpretivist sociologists as being concerned more with the ‘form’ than the ‘being’, the ‘structure’ rather than the ‘content’, perhaps too dryly rigorous in its attention to the detail of social interaction data, perhaps too narrowly focused on questions of ‘how’ as opposed to ‘why’ of social phenomena. And yet it is against this backdrop that I want to argue that EM, or more correctly, EM-informed approaches to qualitative research can offer something different, unique and liberating to scholars of touristic phenomena, which can only add to our critical understanding of tourism and to our cannon of available methodologies. It is in this sense that these approaches can offer a critically different voice in tourism research in the context of the way 228 in which we treat touristic qualitative data, and in terms of how such data can be used to open up new possibilities of analytic subjects. For considerations of space and focus, this chapter focuses on EM as the root epistemological position to enable us to locate the ontological position of EM, but it refers to CA and other related approaches, notably discursive psychology (DP), where appropriate, and first outlines the basic principles of EM and its epistemological antecedents. This is followed by a description of the key concepts in EM, which will enable a comparison between EM's position and that of other interpretivist approaches. Some examples are then provided which demonstrate the richness of analysis which can be accessed using these approaches applied to tourism data and for the development of specific EM-informed tourism projects, and the chapter concludes with a discussion on the range of research topics in tourism which can be explored through an EM-informed approach.
