Breaking down the question
The command word "examine" asks you to set out both perspectives and assess how each challenges positivism. The question has three parts that must all appear — a working idea of what positivism claims, an account of the phenomenological perspective, and an account of ethnomethodology — with the connecting thread being their shared rejection of the positivist model of a science of society.
The core of the answer is that positivism treats society as an external, objective reality governed by law-like regularities that can be measured and explained like nature. Phenomenology and ethnomethodology reverse this: they hold that social reality is not given but continuously produced by members through their interpretations and everyday practices. Our notes on non-positivist methodologies develop these interpretive traditions in detail.
At 10 marks, be economical — define positivism briefly, then devote the bulk of the answer to the two critiques.
How to approach it
Begin by stating the positivist position in one compact paragraph: an objective social world, observable social facts, quantitative method, and the search for causal laws on the model of natural science.
Then take phenomenology, drawing on Schutz and Husserl, to argue that social reality is constituted in consciousness through shared meanings and typifications in the lifeworld, so it cannot be grasped by treating facts as external things. Follow with ethnomethodology, drawing on Garfinkel, to show that social order is a practical accomplishment achieved through the tacit methods members use to make sense of situations.
Conclude by drawing out their common critique — that positivism mistakes the interpreted, negotiated character of social life for a fixed objective order — while noting the limits of these approaches.
Model answer
Positivism, the founding methodological stance of sociology, holds that society is an objective reality external to individuals, made up of observable social facts that can be measured and explained through general causal laws, on the model of the natural sciences. Phenomenological and ethnomethodological perspectives arose as fundamental critiques of this position, arguing that social reality is not a thing to be observed from outside but a meaningful world continuously constructed by its members.
Phenomenological sociology derives from Edmund Husserl's philosophy and was carried into sociology chiefly by Alfred Schutz. Its central claim is that the social world exists first and foremost as a world of meaning within human consciousness. People do not encounter a raw external reality; they experience a "lifeworld" already organised through shared stocks of knowledge and "typifications" — common-sense categories through which they classify persons, objects and situations. Social reality is therefore intersubjective: it is sustained because members assume they share a common perspective and interpret the world in broadly similar ways. From this standpoint, positivism commits a basic error. By treating social facts as external things and imposing the observer's own categories through fixed instruments, it bypasses the very process — the making of meaning — that constitutes social life. A questionnaire counts responses but ignores how respondents interpreted the questions, so its apparent objectivity is illusory.
Ethnomethodology, founded by Harold Garfinkel, radicalises this critique by studying the methods ordinary members use to produce and recognise social order in everyday life. Its subject is not social structure as such but the taken-for-granted practical reasoning through which people accomplish orderly, intelligible interaction. Two ideas are central. "Indexicality" means that the sense of any utterance or action depends on its context, so meaning is never fixed but must be worked out afresh in each situation. "Reflexivity" means that in describing a situation members are simultaneously constituting it. Garfinkel's famous "breaching experiments", in which students disrupted ordinary expectations, revealed how much unspoken, shared method underlies even the simplest exchange. For ethnomethodology, social order is not an external structure that determines behaviour but an ongoing practical accomplishment. Positivist sociology, which treats order as a given fact and its own categories as neutral, therefore mistakes members' achievements for objective realities and imposes meaning rather than discovering it.
Together the two perspectives mount a powerful challenge. Both deny that social facts exist independently of interpretation; both hold that the methods of natural science are inappropriate to a subject matter made of meaning; and both direct attention to the micro-processes by which reality is constructed. Their critique restored the interpreting, active subject to the centre of sociology.
The approaches are not without limitations. By concentrating on the minutiae of everyday interaction, they tend to neglect large-scale structures, power and inequality, and their findings are difficult to generalise. Critics charge that ethnomethodology can appear trivial and that both understate the constraining force of institutions. Nonetheless, as a critique of positivism they permanently unsettled the assumption that society can be studied exactly as nature is.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner wants a clear contrast, so a crisp statement of the positivist position is essential before the critiques can bite. Weak answers describe phenomenology and ethnomethodology in isolation and forget to relate them back to positivism, which is what the question demands.
Precise vocabulary earns marks: lifeworld, typification and intersubjectivity for phenomenology; indexicality, reflexivity and the breaching experiments for ethnomethodology. A short evaluative close — acknowledging their neglect of structure and power — turns an accurate account into a genuinely examined one and lifts the script into the higher band.