Analytical Sociology and Ethnomethodology: Social Ontology Reconsidered in the Cases of Secrecy and Routineness

Three terms will be appropriated in this research: ethnomethodology, analytical sociology, and social ontology. To some extent they are related and complementary. The attempted assumption is that social order may be better understood through not only social mechanisms theories, but also theories of daily practices. The analysis of daily practices presents us an order existed/implied in sociality or social interaction, that is , the idea of routineness. Routineness constitutes not just visible side of daily life, but also invisible one. The basic argument in this essay considering the idea of routineness as “being-supported-by-secrecy-in-daily-life” will be elaborated further through some empirical investigations. Of which two fields will be selected: how order is recovered on public transportations, and how and what kind of mobilization is achieved through the use of new social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or others. When considering a distinction of routineness and secrecy as two sides of a coin, this essay will demonstrate that on one hand the fact that certain kind of power generated by social institution (which is the main idea of social ontology) must not ignore the changing and becoming integrated characteristics of daily practices, the coin we will introduce here, and on the other hand, based on the assumption of this essay, the changing meaning of mobilization from offline (the presence of body) to online (the absence of body) in the use of more and more technologies can be understood differently if being put in the observation that power formed through routineness invisibly supported by secrecy operates not only virtually but also in/to the real world. And this will be a try through examining the daily practices of laymen in the sense of ethnomethodology and the theory of social ontology.