Background Expectations

Definition

Background expectations are Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodological term for the taken-for-granted, tacit understandings that enable social interaction and produce social order. They are the "natural facts of life" that members of a society rely on to interpret events as "familiar, normal, unremarkable." They form the invisible structure of the everyday — not one "finite region of meaning" (adapting Schütz) but the condition of those regions. To see them, one must deliberately disrupt order: Garfinkel's "breaching experiments" produced "confusion, fright, shame" in subjects whose background expectations were violated. In ethnomethodology, "society" is real only as the methods used to explain it — background expectations are these methods.

Key Thinkers

• Harold Garfinkel — coined and operationalized the concept; Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967).
• (Related, not yet paged: Alfred Schütz — the "stock of cash experiences" that Garfinkel extends into taken-for-granted interpretive schemes; Erving Goffman — frame analysis as the situational organization of background expectations.)

Related Concepts

• Everyday Life — the domain whose hidden order background expectations constitute; Garfinkel treats everyday life not as one region of meaning but as the condition of all such regions.
• Habitus — Bourdieu's parallel concept of pre-conscious dispositions, though Garfinkel emphasizes methodical accomplishment over embodied reproduction.
• The Social — in ethnomethodology, "society" is real only as the methods (background expectations) used to explain it.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Daily Life as a Phenomenon of Modern Philosophical Discourse
• Culturally 'Doped' or Not?
• Everyday Practices and Practical Formalization

Open Questions

• Are background expectations the same as Schütz's "stock of cash experiences," or does Garfinkel's ethnomethodological framing (breaching as method of discovery) add something conceptually distinct?
• If background expectations are invisible except when breached, how can architectural and urban design account for them without falling into deterministic "environmental" models of behaviour?