The Ethogenic Approach: Theory and Practice

Abstract

A central preoccupation of the ethogenic approach is to establish a fruitful connection between microsociology and social psychology and, in particular, to base social psychology on an adequate and explicit microsociology. It is vital to utilize the extremely good microsociology that has been developed by the symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists in the construction of a social psychology that takes its problems from that kind of microsociology and not from amateur or intuitive conceptions of the structure and meaning of social interactions. And as the main psychological technique in ethogenics is the analysis of the speech of participants in social life, the very detailed and often extremely subtle analyses of ordinary language made by the Oxford School of philosophers and others in the linguistic tradition can be employed in the course of which are revealed the theories implicit in ordinary speech. These two developments— the one in microsociology and the other in language analysis—contribute an enormous but previously untapped resource.