Ethnomethodology and the moral accountability of interaction: Navigating the conceptual terrain of ‘face’ and face-work

Ethnomethodology investigates the mundane, practical work of society's members’ sense-making practices and how they reproduce social–moral orders. It also reminds us that ‘face’ and face-work are overarching social science concepts which assist social scientists in doing their descriptive work. This paper outlines aspects of ethnomethodology's contribution to the study of ‘face’ and the doing of face-work in terms of an interactional accomplishment. While this occupied Goffman, he did not use detailed data of the kind this paper uses – that is, audio/video recordings and subsequent detailed transcriptions of members’ everyday naturally occurring interaction. The paper will reproduce one strip of interaction drawn from a wider ethnographic study of senior organizational members doing their strategy work across time and space. The analytical interest is focused on just two aspects: one is Garfinkel's notion of the moral accountability of action, and the second draws on Sacks’ seminal work on membership categorization devices. The latter brings to our attention the predicates or ‘rights and obligations’ pertaining to categories. Moreover, when a breach is discerned on this front, then emotional displays are skillfully warranted as the excerpt indicates. Examining members interactional accomplishment of such phenomena as proposed here will be shown to add further empirical and theoretical texture/insight to Goffman's concept of face and face-work, or, as is proposed here, the moral accountability of interaction constituting social–moral order(s) or ‘society’.