(Foundations of Human Interaction) Douglas W. Maynard, John Heritage - The Ethnomethodology Program - Legacies and Prospects-Oxford University Press (2022)

The Ethnomethodology Program
F O U N DAT IO N S O F H UM A N I N T E R AC T IO N
General Editor: N.J. Enfield, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Radboud University, Nijmegen, and the University of Sydney
This series promotes new interdisciplinary research on the elements of human sociality,
in particular as they relate to the activity and experience of communicative interaction
and human relationships. Books in this series explore the foundations of human
interaction from a wide range of perspectives, using multiple theoretical and
methodological tools. A premise of the series is that a proper understanding of
human sociality is only possible if we take a truly interdisciplinary approach.
Series Editorial Board:

Michael Tomasello (Max Planck Institute Leipzig)
Dan Sperber (Jean Nicod Institute)
Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (University of Helsinki)
Paul Kockelman (University of Texas, Austin)
Sotaro Kita (University of Warwick)
Tanya Stivers (University of California, Los Angeles)
Jack Sidnell (University of Toronto)
Recently published in the series:
Relationship Thinking
N.J. Enfield
Talking About Troubles in Conversation
Gail Jefferson
Edited by Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gene Lerner, and Anita Pomerantz
The Instruction of Imagination
Daniel Dor
How Traditions Live and Die
Olivier Morin
The Origins of Fairness
Nicolas Baumard
Requesting Responsibility
Jörg Zinken
Accountability in Social Interaction
Jeffrey Robinson
Intercorporeality
Edited by Christian Meyer, Jürgen Streeck, J. Scott Jordan
Repairing the Broken Surface of Talk
Gail Jefferson
Edited by Jörg Bergmann and Paul Drew
The Normative Animal?
Neil Roughley and Kurt Bayertz
When Conversation Lapses
Elliott M. Hoey
Communicating & Relating
Robert B. Arundale
Asking and Telling in Conversation
Anita Pomerantz
Face-to-Face Dialogue
Janet Beavin Bavelas
The Book of Answers
Tanya Stivers
The Ethnomethodology
Program
Legacies and Prospects
Edited by
D OU G L A S W. M AY NA R D
J O H N H E R I TAG E
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Maynard, Douglas W., 1946– editor. | Heritage, John, editor.
Title: The ethnomethodology program : legacies and prospects /
Douglas W. Maynard and John Heritage.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021046051 (print) | LCCN 2021046052 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190854416 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190854409 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190854447 | ISBN 9780190854423 | ISBN 9780190854430 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Garfinkel, Harold. | Ethnomethodology.
Classification: LCC HM481 .E85 2022 (print) | LCC HM481 (ebook) |
DDC 305.8001—dc22
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LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046052
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190854409.001.0001
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors ix
1. Ethnomethodology’s Legacies and Prospects 1

John Heritage and Douglas W. Maynard
PA RT I : A N T E C E D E N T S A N D T H E O RY
2. A Comparison of Decisions Made on Four “Pre-Theoretical”

Problems by Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schütz 71
Harold Garfinkel
3. Harold Garfinkel’s Focus on Racism, Inequality, and Social Justice:
The Early Years, 1939–1952 90
Anne Warfield Rawls
4. Garfinkel’s Studies of Work 114
Michael E. Lynch
PA RT I I : E M P I R IC A L I M PAC T
5. Sources of Issues and Ways of Working: An Introduction to

the Study of Naturally Organized Ordinary Activities 141
Harold Garfinkel
6. Rules and Policeable Matters: Enforcing the Civil Sidewalk
Ordinance for “Another First Time” 162
Geoffrey Raymond, Lillian Jungleib, Don Zimmerman,
and Nikki Jones
7. The Cooperative, Transformative Organization of Human Action
and Knowledge 188
Charles Goodwin
8. Sex and the Sociological Dope: Garfinkel’s Intervention into the
Emerging Disciplines of Sex/Gender 214
Kristen Schilt
vi Contents
9. Garfinkel, Social Problems, and Deviance: Reflections on

the Values of Ethnomethodology 227
Darin Weinberg
10. The Ethnomethodological Lineage of Conversation Analysis 252
Steven E. Clayman, John Heritage, and Douglas W. Maynard
PA RT I I I : G R OW T H P O I N T S
11. The Situated and Methodic Production of Accountable Action:

The Challenges of Multimodality 289
Lorenza Mondada
12. Recovering the Work of a Discovering Science with a
Video Camera in Hand: The Electronically Probed/Visually
Discovered Spectrum 322
Philippe Sormani
13. Research with Numbers 348
Michael Mair, Wes W. Sharrock, and Christian Greiffenhagen
14. The Sherlock Experiment 371
Eric Livingston and John Heritage
15. Technology in Practice 398
Christian Heath and Paul Luff
16. Occam’s Razor and the Challenges of Generalization in
Ethnomethodology 420
Iddo Tavory
17. Ethnomethodology and Atypical Interaction: The Case of Autism 442
Douglas W. Maynard and Jason J. Turowetz
Notes 477
Name Index 495
Subject Index 503
Acknowledgments
This book emerged as a result of a gathering at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) to celebrate Harold Garfinkel’s life and work, and to take stock of his research
endeavors, their influence, and their contemporary development. We are grateful to the
organizers of this meeting, including Emanuel Schegloff and Stefan Timmermans, for
assembling a group of scholars who have been influenced by Garfinkel and his ethno-
methodological inquiries, and to UCLA and the Department of Sociology for facilitating
and hosting the meeting.
The present volume arose from our collective belief that the meeting contained too
much of value to be consigned to the vagaries of collective memory, and that instead
it could form a nucleus for a wider and more integrated consideration of Garfinkel’s
initiatives and their consequences. We are grateful to Meredith Keffer, Acquisitions
Editor and Macey Fairchild, Project Editor, at Oxford University Press, and Preetham Raj,
Project Manager, at Newgen Knowledge Works, for expertly shepherding the manuscript
through the production process. Keith Cox handled the responsibilities of assembling
the chapters and graphics for submission to Oxford University Press, and Lucas Wiscons
facilitated the enhancement of graphic images for several of the chapters. We also thank
Keith Cox and Lucas Wiscons for their prompt and skillful assembly of the subject and
name indexes.
Contributors
Steven E. Clayman
Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Harold Garfinkel
Formerly Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Charles Goodwin
Formerly Professor of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Christian Greiffenhagen
Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Christian Heath
Professor of Work and Organisation, King’s College, London, England
John Heritage
Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Nikki Jones
Department of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Lillian Jungleib
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Eric Livingston
Faculty of Medicine and Health; School of Psychology, University of New England,
Armidale, Australia
Paul Luff
Professor in Organisations and Technology, King’s College, London, England
Michael E. Lynch
Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Michael Mair
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, England
Douglas W. Maynard
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. USA
Lorenza Mondada
Professor for French and General Linguistics, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
x Contributors
Anne Warfield Rawls

Department of Sociology, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA; University of Siegen,
Siegen, GE
Geoffrey Raymond
Kristen Schilt
Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Wes W. Sharrock
Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, Manchester, England
Philippe Sormani
Senior FNS Researcher, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Iddo Tavory
Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
Jason J. Turowetz
Garfinkel Archive, Newburyport, MA, USA; University of Siegen, Siegen, GE
Darin Weinberg
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England
Don Zimmerman
1
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies
and Prospects
John Heritage and Douglas W. Maynard
It is now a little over 50 years since Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology

was first published. This period has witnessed the growth of Garfinkel’s substan-
tial, yet in some ways subterranean, influence that has permeated throughout the
social sciences. Initially controversial, complex, and hard to digest, Garfinkel’s
writings nevertheless have exerted a widespread and acknowledged influence on
the discipline of sociology, and a number of its subfields. They also have exerted
a less acknowledged, but no less profound, effect on a range of other adjacent
disciplines.
At the beginning of his Harvard dissertation, prepared under the supervision
of Talcott Parsons, Garfinkel (1952) wrote:
At least two important theoretical developments stem from the researches

begun by Max Weber. One development, already well worked, seeks to arrive
at a generalized social system by uniting a theory that treats the structuring
of experience with another designed to answer the question “what is man?”
Speaking loosely, a synthesis is attempted between the facts of social struc-
ture and the facts of personality. The other development, not yet adequately
exploited, seeks a generalized social system built solely from the analysis of ex-
perience structures. (1952:2)
The first development was, of course, the one pioneered by Parsons himself
(1951). The second, with its focus on the structuring of experience as the foun-
dation of social organization, would occupy Garfinkel over the next 50 years and
beyond. It would lead to a variety of quasi-experimental “breaching” studies,
to explorations of the ineluctable contextuality of human reasoning, action,
and language use, to a re-specification of the role of norms in social action, to
studies of the embodied management of courses of action ranging from the most
mundane of everyday activities to fundamental scientific experiments, and to
investigations of singular events such as moments of scientific discovery. In the
process, Garfinkel engaged with topics in social science—the theory of action,

2 The Ethnomethodology Program
the nature of intersubjectivity, and the social constitution of knowledge—that

have always been at its foundational core. Although appreciation of his work con-
tinues to grow, the breadth and penetration of his insights and their implications
have yet to secure their full measure of recognition as primary scholarship, and
as a source of inspiration for ongoing research.
The present volume was conceived in the aftermath of a gathering at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to review Garfinkel’s life and work,
and to take stock of his researches, their influence, and their contemporary de-
velopment. This is no easy task. Always reluctant to publish, and guarded about
his sources and influences, Garfinkel left a vast archive of written and audiovisual
documents to the guardianship of Anne Rawls. Over time, these will likely reveal
a very much fuller picture of Garfinkel’s intellectual stimuli and involvements,
but there is already much to come to terms with. In what follows, we present a
basic outline of the general trajectory of Garfinkel’s life and thought, with a pri-
mary focus both on his sociological antecedents and on the fields in which his
work has had an enduring influence.
Garfinkel’s Development
Early Life and Work in North Carolina
Harold Garfinkel was born in 1917 into a large Jewish community in Newark,
New Jersey. The initial plan was for him to join the small furniture business
owned by his father, and to this end he enrolled at the University of Newark (now
part of Rutgers University) for training in business and accounting. During
this period, Garfinkel developed a strong interest in sociology and, having
graduated in 1939, proceeded to become a graduate student in the Sociology
Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Garfinkel
2002a; Rawls 2002 and Chapter 3 in this volume). The graduate students he
joined at North Carolina had Weberian interests, drawing on Znaniecki’s work
on Social Actions (1936), and Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action (1937).
From the philosophy department, Garfinkel was exposed to phenomenological
texts, including those by Husserl (Garfinkel 2002b). The sociology department
was headed by the redoubtable Howard Odum, a scholar and administrator of
immense energy, the founder of the journal Social Forces, and a past president
of the American Sociological Association (1930). Odum was strongly committed
to the study of African American culture in the South, and to racial progress
(Vance and Jocher 1955), and this interest was shared by Garfinkel, whose two
earliest publications addressed issues of racism and racial injustice (Rawls,
Chapter 3 in this volume).
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies and Prospects 3
The first of these, “Color Trouble” (Garfinkel 1941), was a quasi-ethnographic

account of an incident on a bus traveling from New Jersey to North Carolina.
At a stop in Petersburg, Virginia, Garfinkel observed a developing dispute be-
tween the driver of the bus and two black passengers who refused to move to the
back of the bus in compliance with the Jim Crow rules of the period. Garfinkel’s
reporting of the dispute was focused on the tacit presuppositions mobilized in
the interaction, and the difficulties the bus driver and white onlookers had in
making sense of what the black passengers were doing (Rawls, Chapter 3 in this
volume). “Color Trouble” was initially published in Opportunity magazine, an
academic outlet of the National Urban League, and subsequently, as if it were a
work of fiction, in The Best Short Stories 1941 (Garfinkel 1941). Its grounding in
direct observation and witnessed fact, however, is indisputable (Rawls, Chapter 3
in this volume).
Garfinkel’s master’s degree also focused on tacit (and sometimes overt)
presumptions: this time those informing court proceedings in capital cases.
His study examined the court dispositions of 673 homicides in North Carolina
occurring between 1930 and 1940. The study focused primarily on the three most
frequent categories of homicide involving male defendants and victims: white
on white, black on black, and black on white. Examining the trajectory of cases
across the legal sequence of initial grand jury indictments, courtroom charges,
and judicial outcomes, Garfinkel found a broadly comparable distribution
of initial indictments in which both black and white defendants were mainly
charged with first-degree murder. After this point, Garfinkel found, the black
on white (B-W) cases diverged from the others. Two-thirds of the blacks ac-
cused of murdering whites were charged with first-degree murder, and nearly
30 percent were convicted as charged. By contrast, only 42% of whites charged
with murdering blacks were charged at the first-degree level; over half obtained
second-degree murder or manslaughter charges. No whites were convicted of
first-degree murder (Garfinkel 1949). Similar asymmetries held at sentencing;
43% of convicted B-W killers received death sentences, whereas no convicted W-
B killers received this sentence—if not entirely acquitted, most received prison
time (Garfinkel 1949).
Garfinkel interpreted these outcomes using a perspective deriving from the
phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz, and others,
treating the racialized constitution of defendants and their victims as a matter
of court presupposition and practice. Beside the contrast between B-W and
W-B homicides, particularly telling is Garfinkel’s comparison of B-B and W-W
cases in terms of their patterns of charges and convictions. In both groups, the
meanings of offenses underwent alteration. In the W-W cases, these alterations
were managed in terms of detailed understandings of motives, circumstances,
or identities that could moderate the meaning of an offense, and with full
attention to and respect for the overarching demands of justice (Garfinkel 1949).
However, for the B-B cases, although degrees of guilt also emerged, they were not
constructed within an overall orientation to justice as a fundamental or sacred
goal. Neither did motives, circumstances, and identities, if known or understood
at all, carry much weight. The stance of the court in dealing with B-B defendants
was pragmatic, rather than principled. Whereas numbers of B-B cases with first-
degree indictments were reduced to second degree or less, the B-B cases did not
“earn” or deserve such outcomes. Manslaughter was determined to be the most
fitting description of the crime, because it disdainfully allowed “that homicide
was committed, but that the homicide involved Negroes” (Garfinkel 1949).
Taken together, the “Color Trouble” and homicide studies focused on so-
cial justice issues while embodying an analytic framework that centered
on presuppositions involved in the construal of actors and actions in social
encounters. Garfinkel would continue this approach in his preliminary PhD
studies on racial and other minorities at Harvard (Rawls and Turowetz 2019a;
Turowetz and Rawls 2020), in an essay on degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel
1956), and most tellingly in his analysis of Agnes, a transsexual who provided
him with an occasion for a radical rethinking of gender (Garfinkel 1967b; Schilt,
Chapter 8 in this volume). In addition, Garfinkel’s investigation of race-differen-
tial patterns of homicide convictions foreshadowed the critique of excessive reli-
ance on official statistics that emerged in the 1960s. The study presciently took up
a phenomenological critique of the statistical positivism that was then advancing
to ascendency in postwar American sociology (Calhoun 2008; Rawls 2018).
Harvard
After war service (1942–1945), Garfinkel entered Harvard to work on a PhD

dissertation, supervised by Talcott Parsons. Parsons was at this time perhaps
the dominant figure in American sociology. The founding chair of the newly
formed Department of Social Relations (comprising sociology, anthropology,
and psychology) at Harvard and, in 1949, the president of the American
Sociological Association, he recalled the early years of the Department as a
“golden age” of graduate studies, listing Garfinkel in a roster of “unusually able”
graduate student participants (Parsons 1970:842). Garfinkel’s relationship with
Parsons would continue into the 1960s (Rawls and Turowetz 2019b; Turowetz
and Rawls 2020).
Parsons’s sociological celebrity at that time largely rested on The Structure of
Social Action (1937), which presented a large-scale analysis of European social
theorists (Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber), whom Parsons portrayed as
converging on a core theoretical perspective which he termed the “voluntaristic
theory of action.” This perspective was designed to address the Hobbesian

problem of order—the question of how self-interested actors could avoid falling
into a state of mutual competition and destruction—and to do so without lapsing
into cultural idealism or biological determinism. The voluntaristic theory pro-
vided that social actors strive to achieve goals by expending effort over time to
overcome real worldly obstacles. However, these goals, together with the means
selected to achieve them, are shaped by shared values that integrate the goals of
action across actors and restrict the selection of means to achieve them to those
that are normatively legitimate.
Parsons’s fundamental effort during the period that Garfinkel was at Harvard
was to fashion these insights into a systematic social theory, yoking theories
of culture, personality and social systems into an integrated whole. A center-
piece of the new theory was to be a conception of interaction, arising from a
convergence of Freudian and Durkheimian perspectives on the internalization
of norms (Parsons 1952), which provided that interaction will have an intrinsic
bias toward the reinforcement of social integration. This bias arises from the
“double contingency” of interaction in which, in a context of shared norms and
expectations, each actor is rewarded for behaviors that conform with the ends
and values of others, and punished for behaviors that depart from them (Parsons
1951; Parsons and Shils 1951; Vanderstraeten 2002). A further “twofold binding-
in process” reinforced such behaviors through actors’ internalized shared values.
Departures from norms will not only offend others but also lead to subjective
experiences of shame and guilt in the perpetrator. As Parsons (1951) summa-
rized this aspect of his new theory:
The integration of a set of common value patterns with the internalized need-
disposition structure of the constituent personalities is the core phenomenon
of the dynamics of social systems. That the stability of any social system except
the most evanescent interaction process is dependent on a degree of such in-
tegration may be said to be the fundamental dynamic theorem of sociology.
(1951:42)
From his arrival in Cambridge in 1946, Garfinkel began a process of amending

Parsons’s approach to social systems theory. In this endeavor, nudged by his
Harvard mentors, his writings began to center on more abstract sociological
themes of social reasoning and judgment with a lesser, though still discernible,
commitment to social justice questions (Turowetz and Rawls 2020).
Garfinkel began from the standpoint that shared understanding and coor-
dinated action among actors represent a “problem of order” that is more fun-
damental than the more familiar Hobbesian problem that preoccupied Parsons
(Garfinkel 1952:36–89). He argued that the sharing of understandings about
social situations and the continually dynamic contexts of interaction, the ways
in which norms might be appropriately applied to such contexts, and communi-
cation about all of these were all questions about social order that were ontolog-
ically prior to the Hobbesian motivational concerns, which indeed presupposed
all of them. Answering Georg Simmel’s (1910) famous question “How is society
possible?” could not truly be achieved without addressing them.
The intellectual dialogue with Parsons continued into the 1960s in lectures,
meetings, and successive revisions of the Parsons Primer (Garfinkel [1962] 2019;
Rawls and Turowetz 2019a). Rather as Schütz ([1932] 1967) undertook to re-
construct the methodological foundations of Max Weber’s social theory in terms
of meaning construction, Garfinkel’s dissertation attempted the same task for
Parsonian social systems theory. The plausibility of the undertaking rested on
their common commitment to the theoretical centrality of social interaction.
However, Parsons, whose work focused on the motivation of action and the
Hobbesian problem of order, was content with top-down generalizations about
normative values. Garfinkel’s focus from the North Carolina days, by contrast,
was on social experience, and the knitting of that experience through the process
of interaction into constructed and reconstructed orders of meaning that can en-
dure across time and place.
Garfinkel’s (1952) dissertation elaborated a comparison of the handling of
“pre-theoretical” problems by Parsons and Schütz (abridged as Chapter 2 of
this volume), exploring the epistemological and methodological implications of
the notion that the human world is constructed within social interaction, and
only there. The thesis itself was “concerned with the conditions under which a
person makes continuous sense of the world around him” (Garfinkel 1952:1).
The procedure he used to address this question involved the manipulation of
“incongruous” understandings of events by experimental subjects. The results
of the study are briefly reported in Garfinkel (1967e:58–67). Having worked as
an experimenter on the “Information Apperception Test” at Harvard (Rawls,
Chapter 3 in this volume), Garfinkel was experienced in working with incon-
gruity scenarios. It was a technique that he would also continue to exploit in the
ensuing decade at UCLA.
Garfinkel’s primary theoretical resource, both in the dissertation and sub-
sequently, was Alfred Schütz. Arriving in New York in 1940 as a refugee from
Hitler’s Germany, Schütz devoted himself to theoretical research that stressed the
social constitution of experience and knowledge. Drawing on Husserl, Schütz
argued that human experience is constituted within pragmatic presuppositions
that he termed the “epoché of the natural attitude.” Within this attitude of eve-
ryday life, persons assume that the world will be the same today as it was yes-
terday, and that ordinary practices of living will work in the same ways and with
the same effects as they have done previously. The knowledge that actors draw
upon, Schütz averred, is socially presupposed, approximate, and held in typified
forms that are adaptable, and adapted, to circumstances. Significantly, there is
little convergence between this type of recipe knowledge and the rationality of
scientific knowledge. Indeed, Schütz held that the scientific attitude and the nat-
ural attitude are distinct from one another, and the knowledge stemming from
them is not easily compatible. A person may be “rational” in the common-sense
world, but this rationality is pragmatic and not to be confused with scientific ra-
tionality (Garfinkel 1967f; Schütz 1962).
In the context of social interaction, Schütz argued that despite the fact that
actors’ orientations to the world are unavoidably perspectival, they will none-
theless continue to assume what he termed the “general thesis of reciprocal
perspectives” (Schütz 1962:12; Garfinkel 1967e:55–57). The maintenance of this
assumption, Schütz argued, involves no “guarantees”: instead, it depends solely
and entirely on the efforts of the actors themselves. Many of Garfinkel’s early ex-
perimental procedures, or what he called “demonstrations,” were designed to
undermine these reciprocities, and to reveal the associated collapse of intersub-
jectivity that resulted. The demonstrations showed that the management of the
reciprocities is deeply embedded in the moral order, and that they are funda-
mental features of the “trust” conditions (Garfinkel 1963) on which all human
intersubjectivity is fundamentally based. Trust, in Garfinkel’s rendering, consists
in an actor’s assuming the general thesis, assuming that others adhere to it as
well, and assuming that others take for granted the actor’s own adherence to the
thesis.
University of California, Los Angeles
As Garfinkel recounted at the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology (Hill and

Crittenden 1968; Garfinkel 1974), the term “ethnomethodology” emerged out of
work he was doing as a postdoctoral researcher on an audiotaped jury deliber-
ation. There he encountered what he described as “these magnificent methodo-
logical things”:
. . . like “fact” and “fancy” and “opinion” and “my opinion” and “your opinion”
and “what we’re entitled to say” and “what the evidence shows” and “what can
be demonstrated” and “what actually was said” as compared with “what only
you think he said” or “what he seemed to have said.” You have these notions
of evidence and demonstration and of matters of relevance, of true and false,
of public and private, of methodic procedure, and the rest. At the same time
the whole thing was handled by all those concerned as part of the same set-
ting in which they were used by the members, by these jurors, to get the
work of deliberations done. That work for them was deadly serious. (Hill and
Crittenden 1968:7; reprinted in Garfinkel 1974:16)
The methods of reasoning that Garfinkel encountered in the jury project could
not remotely be handled through the Parsonian tenets of social action. Instead,
Garfinkel advocated a form of analysis—ethnomethodology—to investigate
“people’s methods” (Lynch 2007) for jointly determining, in the case of jurors,
facts, evidence, etc., in ways that were publicly accountable. In other contexts,
the methods of reasoning would be different. The term “ethnomethodology” was
intended as a cognate of extant anthropological terms such as “ethnobotany” or
“ethnomedicine,” that focused on the knowledge practices deployed in distinc-
tive sociocultural contexts.
In the process of developing ethnomethodology, Garfinkel initiated huge the-
oretical innovations: that rules and norms could neither determine nor explain
behavior without reference to the details of their situated application; that there
are no guarantees of mutual understandings among persons, nor could such
understandings be achieved except through the practices of situated interac-
tion; and that social reasoning is multitudinous and cannot be reduced to logical
structures. Above all, and notwithstanding his advertised interest in sense-
making, Garfinkel insisted on an anti-cognitivist approach to the topic. Social
sense-making cannot conceivably be reduced to psychological processes, and
shared understanding cannot be understood as the projection of cognitive prop-
erties. Ethnomethodology would focus on the “witnessable order” (Livingston
2008). And it would address the shared social methods that social actors together
use to perceive, recognize, and act upon everyday circumstances, and to do so
in a common, socially shared fashion that is itself recognizable and accountable.
Core Aspects of Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology
The “Documentary Method of Interpretation”
Common to all these methods of practical reasoning, however, were certain

fundamental properties. Perhaps the most basic of these was what Garfinkel,
borrowing from Karl Mannheim (1952), termed “the documentary method of
interpretation.” Mannheim had used the term in connection with a methodolog-
ical discussion of the process of interpretation in historical and cultural analysis
and, in that usage, it bears a strong resemblance to the more traditional notion
of the “hermeneutic circle” explored in German historiography and elsewhere

(Palmer 1969). In a brilliant move, Garfinkel dramatically expanded the no-
tion from its original and rarified specification as a historiographical method,
and argued instead that it is a feature of the most mundane and elementary
understandings, including the recognition of “such common occurrences and
objects as mailmen, friendly gestures, and promises” (Garfinkel 1967a:78). It is
also used in “recognizing what a person is ‘talking about’ given that he does not
say exactly what he means”:
The method consists of treating an actual appearance as “the document of,”

as “pointing to,” as “standing on behalf of,” a presupposed underlying pat-
tern. Not only is the underlying pattern derived from its individual documen-
tary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are
interpreted on the basis of “what is known” about the underlying pattern. Each
is used to elaborate the other. (Garfinkel 1967a:78)
These features of the documentary method would later be characterized as the

indexical and reflexive features of practical reasoning and language use, and
are perhaps most vividly demonstrated by using gestalt figures (Gurwitsch
1964) or social settings with gestalt-like properties (Heritage 1984:84–90; Lynch
1993:127; Maynard 2003:7–11). Garfinkel (1967e:38) also explored the opera-
tion of the documentary method in simple procedures, such as asking students
to report the actual content of commonplace conversations on the left side of a
sheet of paper, and then to describe what they and their partners understood
that they were talking about on the right. Visually, the right side of the paper
(students’ “understandings”) had much more text than the left side (what was
actually said). This discrepancy highlighted numerous properties of the conver-
sational order and the management of intersubjectivity.
These order properties, as Garfinkel (1967e:39–41) observes, include how a
number of the matters that were talked about were not mentioned, individual
remarks were treated as part of a sequence and were oriented to as elements of a
developing conversation, and were understood in a process through which each
party contributed suppositions about what the other could be talking about. In
addition, biographical knowledge about the speakers and circumstantial know-
ledge about the occasion of the conversation were also necessary to make sense
of its content, and the events discussed carried an open horizon of relationships
to other events, as well as retrospective and prospective possibilities both for the
conversation and the events depicted.1 The use of such properties is a morally
sanctioned necessity, sustained through the “trust” conditions, and vividly re-
vealed in Garfinkel’s various breaching experiments.
“Trust” and the Constitution of Social Acts
The breaching demonstrations included the use of everyday games that are easily
disrupted by departures from basic rules. In a celebrated study, Garfinkel (1963)
engineered disruption using a simple field of action—the game of tic-tac-toe.
Garfinkel observed, in parallel with John Rawls (1955), that the game and its as-
sociated field of events are constituted by a set of “basic rules.” These include that
the players take alternate turns; that moves have to be made within the confines
of a single cell; that moves, once made, cannot be changed; and that the object of
the game is to get “three in a row,” which constitutes a victory ending the game.
These rules define the constituent events making up tic-tac-toe. To become con-
stitutive, these rules have to be oriented as framing a set of actions that players
cannot choose to depart from, and that they expect to be binding on other
player(s), and expect that other(s) expect the same of them (Garfinkel 1963:190).
Garfinkel underscores that these constitutive rules are used to define the game
itself. Thus, changes in the basic rules will change the game. The rules will also
define the meanings of actions within the game:
The basic rules provide a behavior’s sense as an action. They are the terms
in which a player decides whether or not he has correctly identified “What
happened.” “Subjective meaning” is “attached” to a behavior in terms of these
rules. (Garfinkel 1963:195)
As will be clear, the basic rules are central to participants’ reasoning about any
“state of play” in the game: for example, a person who sees “two crosses in a row”
should, using what may be termed “tic-tac-toe reasoning,” use their turn to block
the winning third move (cf. Heritage 1998:178–79).
Given their constitution, games are easily disrupted by departures from
basic rules. Garfinkel engineered disruptions by having experimenters (UCLA
undergraduates) invite subjects to make the first move in a game of tic-tac-toe,
then erasing their mark and placing it elsewhere, while avoiding any indication
that something unusual was being done. In over 250 trials (Garfinkel 1963:200–
206), almost all subjects displayed a disturbed reaction to the behavior and 75%
objected strongly to it. However, a small minority, who responded by recipro-
cating the experimenter’s moves, were comparatively serene, having effectively
elected to play a new game. Thus adjusting (or not) to what were treated as con-
stitutive rules of the game with their associated interpretive frameworks had a
major effect on the actions and the sentiments of the participants.
In a series of related procedures aimed at disrupting everyday activities,
experimenters insisted that subjects clarify the meaning of simple remarks. As
is well known, subjects again reacted with bewilderment and anger. Garfinkel
surmised that the procedures undermined a set of “more fundamental”

assumptions through which conduct is visible as intended actions that a group
member assumes “anyone can see” (Garfinkel 1963:198). And he further
conjectured that, with regard to the normative regulation of action, the intensity
of affective commitment to a rule and its moral status may be less important than
its position in constituting the “perceived normality” of social events. The moti-
vational value of internalized norms is altogether less significant than their role
in constituting the meaning of ordinary actions and everyday circumstances:
When the work with games was begun, we took for granted that the
omnirelevance of normative regulation was peculiar to games. . . . When, how-
ever, incongruity-inducing procedures were applied in “real life” situations, it
was unnerving to find the seeming endless variety of events that lent themselves
to the production of really nasty surprises. These events ranged from those that,
according to sociological commonsense, were “critical,” like standing very, very
close to a person while otherwise maintaining an innocuous conversation, to
others that according to sociological commonsense were “trivial,” like saying
“hello” at the termination of a conversation. . . . It was conjectured therefore that
all actions as perceived events may have a constitutive structure, and that per-
haps it is the threat to the normative order of events as such that is the critical
variable in evoking indignation. . . . (Garfinkel 1963:198)
The implication of this constitutive approach to normative structure and so-

cial action would be to shift the focus away from motivation and internalization
in favor of examining norms as related to the more basic procedures through
which actions are produced and understood, and are analyzable as features of the
circumstances in which they are produced.
Social Action and Its Normative Background
The ubiquity of the documentary method in human affairs is associated with

other characteristic features of human reasoning with far-reaching consequences
for the analysis of social action. Garfinkel uses the term “indexical” to describe
the use of context to grasp the meaning of words or phrases, and to grasp their
import as actions. This critique did not deny the existence and relevance of rules
and norms as features of social organization; rather, it stressed that their signifi-
cance had traditionally been construed in unrealistic ways.
During Garfinkel’s early career, a dominant approach to sociological expla-
nation involved what Thomas Wilson (1970) has termed the “normative para-
digm.” This insisted on a direct, causally deterministic relationship between rules
and social conduct. The paradigm modeled participants as entering a setting

that, by virtue of shared cultural norms, they recognize in common; as commu-
nicating with words that index preexisting and shared understandings; and that
work to generate coordinated and normatively appropriate behavior according
to shared institutionalized rules of conduct. Much of Garfinkel’s work leading up
to Studies in Ethnomethodology was aimed at demonstrating the implausibility of
this approach to the analysis of actions and institutions.
Garfinkel’s critique of this framework is well known. It involves, he says, the
invocation of a theorized cultural dope “. . . who produces the stable features of the
society by acting in compliance with pre-established and legitimate alternatives
of action that the common culture provides” (Garfinkel 1967e:68). In this rend-
ering, “the person’s use of commonsense knowledge of social structures over
the temporal ‘succession’ of here and now situations is treated as epiphenom-
enal” (Garfinkel 1967e:68). This framework is impossible to sustain in the face of
basic and easily recognized characteristics of rules and norms, a matter that has
been explored extensively, starting with Garfinkel’s students Wieder (1974) and
Zimmerman (1970), whose works we briefly review later in this chapter.
To begin with, the participants identify a “situation of action” which calls up
the performance of normatively structured actions, and they do it in common
with one another. In addition to assuming that it is done identically or nearly so
by all participants, this conception treats “situations of action” as static rather
than dynamic. However, Garfinkel showed the complex temporal dynamism
of even the simplest conversation. In each “situation,” an unfolding relation-
ship between action and context in which “each elaborates the other” (Garfinkel
1967a:78) drives a continual process of definition and redefinition of the situa-
tion, in which each action is “context shaped and context renewing” (Heritage
1984:242).
Further, social rules and the norms underlying them are quite general in char-
acter. This means that rules have to be applied in particular contexts and must
undergo “interpretation” in the course of these applications. The fact that rules
exist is not in doubt, but when they should be invoked and how their implications
for conduct should be understood are variable. Others followed Garfinkel’s
initiatives in finding that the application of rules was inevitably associated
with ad hoc practices and the use of discretion, and that they were constitutive
of social facts such as crime rates that were otherwise treated as independent
of human reasoning and action (Bittner 1967b; Cicourel 1968; Atkinson 1978;
Heritage 1984; Raymond et al., Chapter 6 in this volume).
An important consequence of this contextual dimension in the application of
norms and the understanding of language (see later discussion in this chapter) is
that norms are always invoked and understood (and words are likewise always
used) “for another first time” (Garfinkel 1967g:9), and that stability in normative
structure, and indeed language use itself, are dependent on their usage and
application. But “stability” is itself a gloss for a large variety of environing
circumstances and considerations. As Raymond et al. (Chapter 6 in this volume)
note, police use of a sidewalk ordinance “for another first time” involves such
matters as when and where they enforce it, the methods they use in doing so,
the various ways in which officers and residents alike are treated as accountable
to the ordinance, who apologizes to whom, and so on. The ordinance therefore
becomes incarnate in how the participants cast the specific particulars of those
scenes as documents of an underlying pattern described in the text of the ordi-
nance, the exceptions it provides for, and the sedimented patterns of enforce-
ment that have preceded the current encounter. The profound embeddedness of
rule application in a complex mesh of ecological circumstances (Goodwin 2000
and Chapter 7 in this volume; Mondada, Chapter 11 in this volume) and the ways
in which these applications are made observable and accountable should be the
true object of normative analysis.
Language Use
The situated characteristics of normative rules also apply to the primary me-
dium of social understanding and communication—language use. The term “in-
dexical” was originally used by linguists to refer to terms whose reference and
meaning unavoidably shift with context: these include pronouns, deictic terms
like “here” and “there,” and time formulations such as “today,” “tomorrow,” etc.
Thus, the expression “I’ll be here tomorrow” cannot be understood without
knowing who the speaker is, where s/he is located, and what day it is, and whether
the expression is a threat, a promise, or some other kind of action.
As was the case for the “documentary method,” Garfinkel massively expands
the meaning of the term “indexical expression” to embrace every use of language.
Because it is based on typification, language is open and elastic in terms of its
fit to real-world circumstances (Schütz 1962; Heritage 1984, 1987) and requires
contextual elaboration to achieve sense and reference. Language usage is also un-
avoidably a part of action-in-context and it therefore involves participants’ rec-
ognition of how it is being used and for what purpose. Garfinkel summarized
these features, in parallel with his account of the documentary method, as the
indexical properties of natural language, and summarized them in the observa-
tion that
a description, for example, in the ways it may be a constituent part of the

circumstances it describes, in endless ways and unavoidably, elaborates those
circumstances and is elaborated by them. (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970:338)
In the 1950s and 1960s, at the dawn of the cybernetic age, the fundamental hope
and expectation was that finite sets of rules could generate all the meanings that
human beings can extract from sentences. This was also the underlying com-
mitment of the “normative paradigm” (Wilson 1970), with its objective of a de-
terministic science of rule-governed behavior. This hope was frustrated during
later decades and, with it, the sociological expectation that a “common cul-
ture” of uninterpreted rule-based symbols could credibly be said to undergird
intersubjectivity and shared understandings in the social world. Though, as
Watson (2008) has commented, quantitative researchers, like the logicians be-
fore them, were aware of the flexibilities of language in use and the difficulties
of establishing equivalences across settings (Blalock 1982; cf. Cicourel 1964),
Garfinkel’s observations accurately anticipated the problems and contradictions
to which this program was heir. Yet if the meaning of rules, norms, and linguistic
signs is assured by nothing other than “stability in usage,” the way is open for the
normative, conceptual, and linguistic plasticity and flexibility that will be both
the condition and consequence of social change. Indeed, dynamism in usage
generates a continuous potential for change, regardless of whether change is
actualized or not (Heritage 2010).
Accountability
Garfinkel understood human action to be necessarily caught in a web of account-

ability, enmeshed in textures of circumstances and motivational attributions
that are endless and unavoidable. It is this omnipresence of accountability that
occupies the center stage of Studies in Ethnomethodology, with its central rec-
ommendation that “the activities whereby members produce and manage
settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for
making those settings ‘account-able’ ” (Garfinkel 1967d:1). Expanding on this,
Garfinkel (1967d:1) observed, “I mean observable-and-reportable, i.e. available
to members as situated practices of looking-and-telling . . . such practices . . . are
carried on under the auspices of, and are made to happen as events in, the same
ordinary affairs that in organizing they describe.” It is this perspective that rad-
ically re-specifies normative explanation in sociology, and that places the con-
stitution of social facts at the center of sociological analysis. In what follows, we
illustrate this with some observations about the sociology of suicide, a domain
preoccupied with the accountability of sudden death.
Emile Durkheim, a founding figure of this domain of research, was scathing
about the officials who were charged with recording suicide because of the “im-
provised judgments” that informed their decisions (Durkheim [1897] 1951:148–
49). However, Durkheim overlooked the fact that the suicide statistics on which
his research was based are merely the aggregate of these very judgments. It was
with the advent of Garfinkel’s work that the constitutive investigative judgments
in the formation of the suicide statistics would take hold as sociological topics.
How are the ordinary judgments of officials to be related to the suicide rates?
In his discussion of the work of coroners and their field investigators,
Garfinkel observes that they begin
. . . with a death that the coroner finds equivocal as to mode of death. That
death they use as a precedent with which various ways of living in society
that could have terminated with that death are searched out and read “in
the remains”; in the scraps of this and that like the body and its trappings,
medicine bottles, notes, bits and pieces of clothing, and other memora-
bilia—stuff that can be photographed, collected, and packaged. Other “re-
mains” are collected too: rumors, passing remarks, and stories—materials in
the “repertoires” of whosoever might be consulted via the common work of
conversations. (1967g:17)
Douglas (1967), drawing on Garfinkel’s work, was the first to argue that some
of the patterns in the suicide statistics—for example, the lower level of suicide
among Catholics compared with Protestants that was relied upon in Durkheim’s
([1897] 1951) classic study—might be a product of the activities of various in-
terested parties in a position to influence rate-producing agencies in predomi-
nantly Catholic and Protestant jurisdictions. This was confirmed by Day (1987)
in a later study of suicide rates in Protestant and Catholic regions of Switzerland,
Austria, and the Netherlands during the late nineteenth century. Day (1987:459)
showed that, by comparison with Protestant areas, Catholic jurisdictions had
elevated levels of deaths classified as “accidental” and theorized that classifying
deaths in this way likely provided a method of avoiding the deep religious, moral,
and social stigma arising from suicide verdicts.
Atkinson’s (1978) research additionally showed that coroners and their field
investigators distinguish between equivocal modes of death, such as falling,
drowning, etc., and unequivocal ones, such as hanging or gunshot wounds.
Equivocal deaths allow more leeway for judgments of accidental death or “open”
verdicts, which will not be recorded as suicides. These judgments are integrated
with findings about the victim’s background and social circumstances—religion,
bereavement, financial pressure, severe illness, depression, etc.—to yield a con-
clusion which is held with varying degrees of doubt or uncertainty. Many dif-
ferent participants—the deceased, the deceased’s family, official investigators,
and recording officials—can all contribute to the final judgment. For example,
investigating officers develop “hunches” about cases based on knowledge of the
mode of death, the circumstances, and the state of mind and motivations of the
deceased (Atkinson 1978). However, both family members and, before their
death, suicidal persons themselves can conceal or mask, or alternatively accen-
tuate, motivations and evidences that could lead to a suicide verdict and, in turn,
investigating officers may be oriented to those possibilities. At the end of the day,
the suicide statistics record the outcomes of a tangle of actions accomplished by
all the relevant actors, who are themselves reflexively oriented to normative con-
siderations, and to prospective and retrospective practical reasoning about the
“remains” of the case.
The notion that sociological phenomena and findings can be profitably
connected to the constitutive sociological work done “in the streets” is also to be
found in Cicourel’s (1968) landmark study of juvenile justice, Wieder’s (1974) in-
vestigation of the operation of the “convict code” in a halfway house for paroled
narcotics addicts, and Dorothy Smith’s (1978) analysis of how mental illness
is portrayed through descriptions of departures from normality. Perhaps the
single most influential of these studies is Garfinkel’s path-breaking analysis of
“Agnes,” an intersexed person who presented at UCLA in 1958 in search of sur-
gery (Garfinkel 1967b; see Schilt, Chapter 8 in this volume).
Collectively, these studies underline the hopeless inadequacy of attempts to
explain human actions in terms of adherence to rules. For just as Durkheim
in the Division of Labor argued that contract alone cannot explain the
arrangements of modern societies because contract is undergirded by what he
termed the non-contractual elements of contract, so Garfinkel shows that the
operation of norms, indeed of the very institution of gender, is undergirded
by an indefinitely large array of socially organized practices of reasoning and
action (Heritage 1984:180–98). Accounting practices that are sustained by
use and reuse, together with many that are “protected from induction” (Sacks
1992a:394) and indefeasible (Pollner 1974a, 1975), are the resources which
persons can and must deploy, regardless of personal interests. These studies
point to the role of accounting practices, not only in explanation and justifi-
cation, but most fundamentally in the constitution of social events and their
everyday apprehension and recognition.
Garfinkel’s theoretical and empirical orientations related to the documen-
tary method of interpretation, the trust conditions providing a moral founda-
tion to the sense of normative orientations in everyday life, the indexical use
of language, and accountability in practical actions such as “counting” suicides
or assembling other official statistics, have provided an inexhaustible baseline
of topics for inquiry, carried forward both broadly and deeply into a pano-
rama of social life domains and activities (Vom Lehn 2013:Chapter 9). We call
these inquiries “ethnomethodology’s legacies,” and we review them in five di-
verse but overlapping collections: (I) language use and social interaction; (II)
ethnographic inquiry and legal environments; (III) science, technology, and
workplace studies; (IV) statistics, surveys, and social problems; and (V) studies
of being and doing: gender, race, and other identities. That ethnomethodology’s
legacies are vast is indicated by these diverse collections, but this also creates se-
vere challenges to any kind of comprehensive overview. Although we review and
cite a very large number of studies, we necessarily have been incomplete in our
references. Those studies we do cite should be taken as pointers toward further
aspects of the literature comprising ethnomethodology’s legacies.
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies I: Language Use and

Social Interaction
By the time Studies in Ethnomethodology appeared in 1967, Garfinkel (1967d:xiii)

had previously published half of its chapters in journals or other edited volumes.
However, publication of the book presented previously unseen work (as in
chapters on jury deliberations and transsexualism) and seemed sharply critical
of more dominant methods in social science, thereby stirring the discipline of
sociology across the board. One result was a host of characterizations that often
contradicted one another. From one direction, as in Lewis Coser’s (1975) ASA
presidential address, ethnomethodology was said to be a sectarian “method in
search of a substance,” and (in related critiques) neo-positivistic, only interested
in observable phenomena, while from another direction, decriers charged it with
being a new form of German idealism and inherently subjective, or even a kind of
“do it yourself linguistics.” Then, politically it was proposed as being everything
from radically liberating, to inherently conservative, to quietist and altogether
apolitical. Many of the critiques were poorly informed, as Mehan and Wood
(1976) and Zimmerman (1976) observed, and were belied by the increasing ex-
pansion and proliferation of ethnomethodological studies that ramified across
an increasing variety of social scientific fields.
Conversation Analysis
By far the most prominent of ethnomethodology’s legacies is the approach to

language and social interaction pioneered by Harvey Sacks, and which has
prompted two major streams of research. One has come to be known as conver-
sation analysis (CA). The other is membership categorization analysis (MCA).
CA is addressed in this volume’s Chapter 10 by Clayman, Heritage, and
Maynard, and we will restrict ourselves to a few observations here. The first
published papers in CA appeared shortly after Garfinkel’s (1967d) volume,
though some were in private circulation previously. Especially important and
influential were Sacks’s then-unpublished lectures, which Gail Jefferson tran-

scribed, and which were circulated around the world in mimeograph form from
1964 onward. Later, edited by Jefferson and introduced by Schegloff, the Lectures
on Conversation (Sacks 1992a, 1992b) were published by Blackwell.
The Lectures were broadly convergent with Garfinkel’s (1967g:1) initial de-
lineation of ethnomethodology, and in particular the idea that there are shared
methods for producing and recognizing conduct, and that the methods for its
production and recognition are identical. As Lynch has noted:
CA adopts an ethnomethodological conception of social activity in which the

most elementary acts are intelligible by reference to the coherent structures of
accountability that those acts help produce. (1993: 260)
CA began from the premise that these methods were real, researchable, and
trans-situational in application. As Sacks put it in one of his lectures:
. . . it is not any particular conversation, as an object, that we are primarily in-

terested in. Our aim is to get into a position to transform . . . our sense of “what
happened,” from a matter of a particular interaction done by particular people,
to a matter of interactions as products of a machinery. (1984:26)
For example, while any in situ deployment of a practice (e.g., initiating re-
pair on another speaker’s talk) may have many differing consequences for the
parties’ understandings and repercussions for subsequent action, other-initi-
ated repair is nevertheless a general practice (or set of practices) that can be
robustly described and repeatedly and reliably identified in other contexts.
Accordingly, Sacks also readily embraced Schegloff ’s mid-1960s introduction
of the use of collections of cases, and this usage has remained standard prac-
tice in CA ever since.
CA studies conceive context in “local” terms. In the first instance, taking turns
in interaction is a highly situated activity, requiring, on a recipient’s part, atten-
tion to a current speaker’s turn to identify its completion, and to determine who
has rights to speak next (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). Moreover, each
turn is both “context-shaped and context-renewing” (Heritage 1984:242), and
analysis involves, as Schegloff (1992:1320) observes, both “position and compo-
sition.” A turn of talk implements a social action that initially displays a grasp of
what was just said (Schegloff 1992), at the same time as it sets the context for a
next action which will also require a similar display (Sacks and Schegloff 1973).
The “context of action” is thus for CA a highly dynamic entity, and one which is
even more intricate once the visual and embodied contexts of action are taken
into account (Streeck, Goodwin, and LeBaron 2011; Goodwin, Chapter 7 in this
volume; Mondada, Chapter 11 in this volume).
The predominantly, indeed overwhelmingly, local nature of interaction has an
important methodological payoff: the so-called next turn proof procedure. Given
that each next turn displays an understanding of the turn before, a speaker of the
current turn can inspect that next turn to see how their own turn was understood,
and so can the external “overhearing” researcher—the conversation analyst. The
analyst, at least partially, can characterize the action-import of a speaker’s turn
by delineating aspects of the recipient’s response.2 That is, each next turn will
be understood as “fitted” to the prior and to be “recipient designed” to display
an orientation to the characteristics of its producer and its context (Sacks et al.
1974:727). Hence, for any given turn, albeit subject to some limitations (Goodwin
and Goodwin 1987; Heritage and Atkinson 1984; Schegloff 1996), mutual
understandings of local context will be on display for analytic treatment.
In the past 50 years, CA has grown enormously and has expanded in ap-
plication to many different languages (Clift 2016; Sidnell and Stivers 2013).
Increasingly, its findings appear to be robust across a range of unrelated lan-
guages (Enfield et al. 2019; Kendrick et al. 2020; Stivers et al. 2009) and have
even been applied to ancient texts (Boas 2017). In the course of its expansion,
accumulating research about interactional practices is finding that they cluster
around the management of fundamental aspects of social life: turn taking (Sacks
et al. 1974); the sequencing of action (Schegloff 2007c); the repair of production
and reception problems (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977); affiliation and
social solidarity; reference; epistemics and deontics; among others (Sidnell and
Stivers 2013). Finally, applications in medicine (Heritage and Maynard 2006),
mass media (Clayman and Heritage 2002), sociolegal contexts (Atkinson and
Drew 1979; Maynard 1984), education (Seedhouse 2011), people-processing
institutions (Heritage and Clayman 2010; Zimmerman 1992), survey research
(Maynard et al. 2002) and collaborative workplaces of various kinds have pro-
liferated very widely.3 CA has also expanded to include analysis of a wide range
of body behaviors and configurations, now effectively its own subfield of “multi-
modal analysis” (Streeck et al. 2011).
CA has become a vast field of study with numerous applications and enor-
mous influence. Within sociology, it has thoroughly rejuvenated the study of so-
cial action in the tradition of Weber, Mead, Parsons, and Goffman, adding rigor
and precision to research that previously traded in broad generalities and glosses.
Its specificity has led to an expanding intersection with linguistics, including the
development of a subfield—interactional linguistics (Clift 2016; Couper-Kuhlen
and Selting 2018)—and infusing the study of language with insights from the
study of action and vice versa.
Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA)
CA is not the only domain of study that Sacks initiated. A second domain—mem-
bership categorization analysis (MCA)—also has a robust intellectual presence.
Many of Sacks’s observations targeted common-sense knowledge of the social
world that is embedded in categorical terms and is deployed in locally managed
sequences of interaction. From early in his career, Sacks’s goal was to create a
formal apparatus for the description of this knowledge. As developed in his dis-
sertation and later, its fundamental concept is the notion of membership cate-
gorization devices (MCDs). These comprise a set of categories and some rules of
application. Categories, Sacks observed, are organized in collections that “go to-
gether” within a given culture: [male/female], [Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim,
etc.], [quarterback, forward, wide receiver, etc.]. As Schegloff (2007a) notes:
. . . some of them go together with alternative sets of other categories (e.g., “pro-
fessor” goes with student, administrator, staff, etc., as “campus” categories on
the one hand, and with plumber, doctor, secretary, undertaker as occupational
categories on the other). (In “The Baby Cried” paper,4 “baby” belongs to several
such alternative collections.) (2007a:467)
Sacks (1972a) described some MCDs as “Pn-adequate,” meaning that the cate-
gories within them can define any member of a population. Age (young, old) and
sex (male, female), per Sacks (1972a:33) are Pn-adequate category collections
(although the sex MCD would now have additional categories, and in some cases
would no longer be regarded as Pn-adequate), while the collection of categories
making up a football team are not. Membership categories have several impor-
tant properties:
1) They are inferentially rich. As Schegloff (2007a:469) states the point, “They
are the store house and the filing system for the common-sense knowledge
that ordinary people—that means ALL people in their capacity as ordinary
people—have about what people are like, how they behave etc.”
2) Much of this richness arises from their association with category-bound
activities: these are activities or conduct generally taken to be typical or
characteristic of category incumbents. Sacks illustrated this with a con-
versation in which a thrice-married male caller to a suicide prevention
center who had worked in the hair and fashion industry was asked about
sexual problems. His response: “You probably suspect, as far as the hair
stylist and, uh one way or the other, they’re straight or homosexual, some-
thing like that” directly connects the question to his previous occupation
(Sacks 1992a:46).
3) Sacks also observed that membership categories are protected against in-
duction: incompatibilities between category membership, behavior, and
other attributes are treated as “exceptions.” Thus, as Sacks notes, “[T]‌here
are, for example, ‘Mommy’s cars’ and ‘Kids’ cars.’ And again, the phenom-
enon of ‘Mommy’s cars’ is protected against induction. It isn’t the case that
if you think that a Pontiac station wagon is a Mommy’s car, then if you
see a kid driving one you say, ‘I guess I’m wrong.’ You see ‘a kid driving a
Mommy’s car.’ ” (Sacks 1992a:394)
Sacks identified a range of rules associated with the use of MCDs. The economy
rule indicates that a single category term from any MCD can do adequate ref-
erence. The consistency rule provides that when one category is deployed to
refer to or identify a person in a scene, then others in the scene may be identi-
fied by reference to the same or other categories from the given collection. Thus,
a person introduced as “a physicist” may prompt a recipient to self-identify as
“a biochemist”—both categories being drawn from the collection “occupations.”
Finally, in his famous paper on children’s stories, Sacks (1972b) argued that these
rules have corollary maxims for recipients. A hearer’s maxim provides that if you
are presented with an action that is tied to some category from a collection, you
“hear it that way” (Sacks 1972b:334). A viewer’s maxim provides that if you see
“a category-bound activity being done, then, if one can see it being done by a
member of a category to which the activity is bound, then: See it that way” (Sacks
1972b:338).
A significant strand of MCA research focuses on identity (Antaki and
Widdicombe 1998; Fitzgerald and Housley 2015), and “the ways that per-
sons make who they are (or what they are doing) visible and recognizable to
others . . . as that kind of person or of doing that kind of action” (Wieder and
Pratt 1990:46), whether it is standing in line (cf. Garfinkel 2002:215– 16;
Garfinkel and Livingston 2003), being a member of some specialized com-
munity of practice (Kitzinger and Mandelbaum 2013), using questions to po-
sition an interview subject’s views as “marginal” or “extreme” (Clayman 2017),
manifesting orientations to heterosexuality (Kitzinger 2005), or (as in the Agnes
study), doing “being a woman.” Other studies work on the relationship between
actions and identity that are managed through deontic and epistemic claims that
are conveyed through action and turn design (Lindström and Weatherall 2015).
Some—perhaps a large majority—of the practices involved exist outside of con-
scious deployment, as in Raymond and Heritage’s (2006) study of the interac-
tional maintenance of the status of grandmother. Finally, this domain is part of
the stock in trade of studies of institutions, where the burden of demonstration
is considerably more straightforward (Boden and Zimmerman 1991; Drew and
Heritage 1992; Heritage and Clayman 2010).
A second strand of MCA research addresses how social actors deploy de-
scriptive categories as a part of the formation of specific social actions. As
Edwards (1998:15) notes, this was central to some of Sacks’s most evocative
early papers—for example, his analysis of how a group of teenagers used the
term “hotrodder”— a category that they “owned” and administered— to
maintain a discursive space separate from adult control. An early study along
these lines was Drew’s (1978) examination of how place names (such as “Divis
Street”) were deployed to build accusations of police conduct in the Northern
Ireland “troubles.” Stokoe (2009) and Stokoe and Edwards (2009) have inves-
tigated couples counseling and related environments in which the categoriza-
tion of circumstances and identities is central. Kameo and Whalen (2015) show
how call-takers at a center for police and fire dispatch deploy a variety of MCDs
to describe those who are the subjects of emergency inquiries or requests: race,
gender, age, height, weight, and clothing type. These categories derive from the
forms that call-takers use and transform a caller’s original narrative not only
into an actionable document for police or fire personnel but also become part
of an official incident report.
In an influential paper, Watson (1997; see also Housley and Fitzgerald
2015) called for a convergence in the deployment of sequential and categorial
approaches to interactional data. This convergence has become progressively actu-
alized in the CA and MCA literature on gender and interaction (Speer and Stokoe
2011b; Stokoe 2012), as well as other categories (Kitzinger and Mandelbaum 2013;
Raymond and Heritage 2006; Rossi and Stivers 2021; Turowetz and Maynard
2015; Watson 1978). We illustrate this using a recent paper by Raymond (2019)
that observes the use of category accounts to address circumstances of perceived
incongruity, indexed by questioning or other signs of puzzlement:
Wkend_Dinner_08:30
1 Ann: So y’know we all met up at Betty Smith’s [apartment first,
2 Jen: [Right,
3 Jen: Uh huh,
4 (.)
5 Ann: An-which is so: disgusting,
6 Jen: Wh-Betty’s is?
7 Ann: W’l y’know she was the only gir:l out of four brothers.
8 Jen: Oh.=I: see::.
9 Ann: Yeah so anyway we started there, b’t then we went to . . .
After Ann describes Betty Smith’s apartment as ‘so: disgusting’ (line 5), Jenny
shows puzzlement (line 6), whereupon Ann alludes to category-bound activities
associated with gender to depict Betty as outnumbered by four untidy brothers

(line 7). This explanation is then acknowledged as understandable (line 8). All
the cases in this study involve addressing incongruity and a display of puz-
zlement through a gender-oriented explanation. The study is of particular
interest because gender per se is not the object of the sequence, and neither
is gender display or identity. Rather, the gender MCD is deployed en passant
as an account to address a local interactional matter, while at the same time
assumed characteristics of gender categories are tacitly renewed as elements
of common-sense belief. A presently unknown proportion of MCD usage is
deployed in this way.
While the previously described studies emerge directly from Sacks’s original
observations, related developments are to be found in what is called the “mo-
rality” of discourse and interaction, and in the parallel development of discursive
psychology (DP), which focuses on the use of psychological categories (Potter
and Wetherell 1987).
The Morality of Discourse

As Bergmann (1998:286) has stated it, the CA approach to morality in interac-
tion has meant a concern with the “intricacies of everyday discourse”—descrip-
tive practices and mechanisms that exhibit the “working of morality” in everyday
life (Turowetz and Maynard 2010). Studies in this vein range from blame
attributions occurring in turns subsequent to reports of “unhappy incidents”
(Pomerantz 1978; Schegloff 2007a), to complaints about the misconduct of third
parties (Drew 1998), to gossip about such parties—distinguished from ordi-
nary complaining by the use of pre-sequences to launch the gossip (Bergmann
1993), to other studies about moral discourse in various institutional settings.
Stivers, Mondada, and Steensig (2011) published a volume showing how access,
certainty, and rights and responsibilities surround and imbue knowledge claims
with moral authority in both everyday and institutional environments. And,
bridging ethnomethodology, CA and MCA approaches to morality are Jayyusi’s
(1984, 1991) broad-ranging studies of membership categories in use and their
display of tacit and explicit normative, value, and other judgments. Along the
way, Jayyusi (1984) carefully works out the analytic complications involved in
MCA, along with the relationship to what Bergmann (1998) calls “protomorality”
and Garfinkel’s (1963, 1967d) elucidation of the trust conditions undergirding
everyday discourse and intersubjectivity. As well, Jayyusi’s treatment of the topic
of morality in interaction is intimately related to Coulter’s (1989) development
of what he calls the “sociologic” involved in the use of membership categories—
their “socially situated usages” (Coulter 1991:48), and “moral inferential logic”
(Jayyusi 1991:240).
Discursive Psychology
Emerging from discursive approaches in the sociology of science (Latour and
Woolgar 1979; Mulkay and Gilbert 1984), proponents of discursive psychology
(DP) began from the observation that many of the basic concepts of social
psychology— perception, cognition, representation, memory, etc.— are also
deployed in ordinary interactions (Edwards 1997; Edwards and Potter 1992;
Potter and Wetherell 1987). Taking an “action-oriented” understanding of lan-
guage as its point of departure, scholars such as Antaki (1994), Billig (1987),
Edwards (1997), Edwards and Potter (1992), and Potter (1996) have questioned
the cognitivist presuppositions predominant in current social psychology.
Although Coulter (1999) has questioned how thorough or cogent its anti-cog-
nitivism is, at least from a kind of Wittgensteinian and ethnomethodological
point of view, DP, instead of engaging experimental manipulation of social situ-
ations,5 investigates how, and to what effect, cognitive concepts are used in eve-
ryday contexts. There are strong resonances here with a neo-Wittgensteinian
and anti-cognitivist treatment of mental predicates (Coulter 1983, 1989), as in
the analysis of conversational uses of “remembering” and its attributes (Edwards
and Middleton 1986; Middleton and Edwards 1990), and their manipulation in
official discourse (Edwards and Potter 1992; Locke and Edwards 2003; Lynch
and Bogen 1996). Similarly, although not in the DP tradition as such, Goodwin
(1987) has studied the use of “forgetfulness” as an interactive resource in the
context of ordinary conversation. DP has also been used in the analysis of ra-
cial categorization (Wetherell and Potter 1993), where there are also significant
convergences with more analytically oriented conversation research.
MCA, Gender, and Race
The most sustained investigations in the MCA tradition are those that address
gender and race. Both categories are what Sacks called “Pn[population]-ad-
equate,” as they are potentially omnirelevant in social life. MCA research into
these and other categories has insisted on their situated deployment, and contex-
tually specified significance.
With both Garfinkel’s famous “Agnes” study and the massively influential
“Doing Gender” statement of West and Zimmerman (1987) as important back-
ground, Speer and Stokoe’s (2011a) introduction to their book on Gender and
Conversation (2011b) takes issue with “essentialist” approaches to gender and
talk, which have unsuccessfully posited linguistic productions—classically, tag
questions (Lakoff 1975), but also interruptions, per the CA-related research
of West and Zimmerman (1983)—as being driven by the gender categories to
which participants belong. It also critiques (a) “constructionist” versions that
remain top down in the sense of suggesting how participants in interaction “do”
femininities and masculinities, and (b) feminist CA (Kitzinger 2000) for the pos-
sibility that prioritizing gender in the analysis of talk may “re-essentialize” the
identity, overlooking more basic “identity” practices related to person reference
and other mechanisms in talk.
Each of the chapters in the Speer and Stokoe (2011b) volume, although
sharing these critiques, have different starting points. Drawing on Schegloff ’s
(1991) notions about doing technical analysis of talk-in-interaction, and only
tracing the relevance of MCDs according to participants’ orientations and the
“procedural consequentiality” of categories,6 the book has four parts: (I) gender,
person reference, and self-categorization (as related to interactional goals and
contexts for their achievement, for example); (II) gender, repair, and recipient
design (the use of repair mechanisms to reformulate gender references involving
third parties); (III) gender and action formation (related to complimenting,
assessing, telling jokes, affiliating, and others); and (IV) gender and membership
categorization practices (especially in interactions among children as they play,
argue, insult one another, and so forth). More recent work relevant to gender, in-
teraction, and categorization includes Raymond’s (2019) previously noted anal-
ysis of “category accounts” and how, in explaining what a participant (through a
repair initiation) takes to be a troublesome utterance, speakers may resolve the
difficulty by using a normatively based gender formulation. Thereby, paradoxi-
cally, they reconstitute common-sense stereotypes in situations where reported
behavior is treated (in the conversation) as anomalous.
Whereas studies of gender in conversation analysis have proliferated, that is
less the case when it comes to race. Although race also may be “Pn-adequate”
in the sense that it could be applied to any member (Sacks 1972a:32–33), it may
not have the ubiquitous visibility nor potential consequentiality (for example, in
same-race interactions) as does gender. At the same time, it is clear that CA and
MCA studies involving race are presently emergent (Rawls and Duck 2020).
Whitehead, drawing from the literature on MCDs, has a series of studies re-
lated to race and racial categorization. One paper (Whitehead 2009) explores
participants’ use of racial referencing to describe or explain actions of people.
When speakers perform such an action, it raises the possibility that they will be
understood or seen to be doing this action because of their own race. Accordingly,
to avoid being categorized when they categorize others, speakers deploy several
conversational practices that show an orientation to race as a normative. envi-
ronment for social action. In another paper, Whitehead (2015) draws on the re-
search in CA concerned with preference structure to illuminate how the hearer
of a racial stereotype can show resistance by way of deploying silence and other
forms of delay that give a speaker the chance to back down. However, when the
speaker does not do so, the hearer may engage what are otherwise dispreferred
turn formats to confront the speaker. In a third paper, Whitehead (2018) pursues
the matter of racial common sense and stereotyping, critiquing a predominant
mode of analyzing stereotypes, which is cognitive. The paper shows how analysis,
rather than being about what people think, can examine what they do through
modes of interaction, whether it is to sanction or to align with a racialized trajec-
tory in the talk. There are still further papers, including one in which Whitehead
(2020) suggests the possibility of bringing an analytic lens to implicitness in the
invocation of racial categories in interaction.
The data for Whitehead’s studies derive from two sets. One is a racial sensi-
tivity training session or workshop involving participants from a “White Group”
and from a “People of Color Group.” The other data are recorded interactions
from call-in shows on three South African radio stations. Accordingly, the data
for Whitehead’s studies are drawn from specialized environments rather than
more everyday or “ordinary” contexts, but it is important to recognize that
it is exceedingly difficult to collect more “naturally occurring” interactions
in which racialized utterances are present. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw
from “opportunistic” or “institutional” third-party video data venues in which
the interactions feature racial conflict (Jones and Raymond 2012; Whitehead,
Bowman, and Raymond 2018), as a paper by Rawls, Duck, and Turowetz (2018)
demonstrates.
Across the domains of CA and MCA, there is a manifest relationship to the
“linguistic turn” in philosophy, when scholars began exploring language as a
mode of life, a way of being, or, to paraphrase the philosopher John Austin, a
realm in which people “do things with words.” As scholars interested in practices
of language use, analysts of conversation and of membership categories propose
that speech is neither an appendage to, nor an epiphenomenon of, human con-
duct. It is not simply a repository of meaning that can be tapped as a resource for
the investigation of sociology’s substantive problems. Language use and social
interaction are themselves the substance; they are the site where people produce
elementary forms of social organization that are irreducible to terms other than
those of intrinsic composition.
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies II: Ethnographic Inquiry and

Legal Environments
Notwithstanding Garfinkel’s close theoretical connections to Parsons

throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, the subject matter of ethnomethodo-
logical studies—everyday life activities, and the knitting together of social expe-
rience by way of accounting practices (Garfinkel 1967g)—also had the potential
to attract those aligned with extant forms of ethnographic inquiry and “symbolic
interactionism,” the term that Blumer (1969) coined to capture the tradition set
in motion by George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. By the 1960s, fieldwork
in this tradition had a strong presence in the sociological world, especially as
represented by the “Chicago School” (Abbott 1999; Becker 1999; Fine 1995),
which was self-consciously aligned against such figures as Robert Merton and
Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia, and Talcott Parsons and Samuel Stouffer at Harvard
(Abbott 1999:9–10,78).
Ethnomethodology and Ethnographic Inquiry
Accordingly, it would seem that those aspects of the Chicago School embodied
in the theoretical concerns of Blumer (1969), and in the real-worldly observa-
tional and interpretive traditions of the Everett Hughes–Howard Becker7 or
Lloyd Warner–Erving Goffman linkages (cf. Abbott 1999) would provide a com-
patible field of inquiry for ethnographic ethnomethodologists. Consider Pollner
and Emerson’s (2007) opening paragraph in a chapter on “Ethnomethodology
and Ethnography”:
The overlap of genealogies, concerns and prefixes might lead one to expect a
cordial relationship between ethnomethodology (EM) and ethnography (EG).
Both perspectives are informed by the interpretive tradition, concerned with
the lifeworld, respect the point of view of the social actor (hence “ethno-”), and
typically eschew quantitative and theoretical approaches. From a distance—the
heights of, say, macro-or historical sociology—the family resemblances must
seem striking. Despite the similarities, however, the relationship has not been
congenial. (2007:118)
Although there are ethnographers who draw on ethnomethodology (Emerson

2015; Katz 1999), the crucial point of friction arose from ethnomethodologists’
insistence on the distinction between topic and resource. The point here was
that interpretive sociologists’ observations about roles, rules, statuses, and other
social structures, however well-documented ethnographically and set in corre-
spondence with actual conduct, need appreciation as reflexive accomplishments
rather than resources for explaining observed conduct. They are “contingent
accomplishments of the production and recognition work of parties” to an ac-
tivity (Zimmerman and Pollner 1970:94). In line with this notion of contingent
accomplishment, Manning (1970) noted that ethnographic and other studies of
organizations that employ the device of taking the perspective of participants in
various sectors of the organization to document their orientation to roles and
rules, nevertheless lack an analysis of how these participants embed role and
rule usage according to situated contingencies. Denzin (1970:271), a symbolic

interactionist, is an example in his proposal to assimilate ethnomethodology to
that perspective because of a joint concern with the actors’ point of view and the
aim “to uncover the rules and rituals participants take for granted.” The sugges-
tion is that such a concern “provides the analyst with the resources for predicting
and explaining actual events in the society” (Denzin 1970:288). The trouble with
such formulations, Zimmerman and Wieder (1970:287–89) point out in their re-
sponse to Denzin, is that they distort the central phenomenon in ethnomethod-
ological studies, which is the question of how participants use, inter alia, norms
and rules to “go about the task of seeing, describing and explaining order in the
world in which they live” (Zimmerman and Wieder 1970:289, italics in original).
As we observed at the beginning of this paragraph and earlier in this chapter, in
ethnomethodology, rules, rituals, meanings, and definitions are topics of inquiry,
and the question is how members accomplish the visibility of these features,
rather than how the features organize social life in the first place.8 In other words,
rules, roles, and related phenomena are not resources by which the analyst can
account for social order.
Excavation in Ethnographic Ethnomethodology

We will refer to early ethnomethodological ethnography as excavating usual
qualitative or interpretive preoccupations. Chicago School and related ethnog-
raphies elevated meanings and understandings to an abstracted conceptual
realm by way of roles, rules, statuses, and other terms as the means for ana-
lyzing patterns in everyday life. Contrastively, to draw on Garfinkel (1996:18),
there is a member-produced, organized coherence in the details of the practices
by which participants make a setting’s features visible and available to one an-
other as the taken-for-granted structures, including roles, rules, and the rest,
which they confront as externalities. Excavating an investigator’s inquiry means
grounding members’ actual actions and activities in lived experience and its con-
stituent forms of talk and embodied conduct.9 Although at the price of usual
orientations to generality (see Tavory, Chapter 16 in this volume), it also means
respecting, by bringing under scrutiny, what Garfinkel 2002:99, note 16) came
to call the “quiddity,” “haecceity,” or “just-thisness” of everyday conduct—how
social objects and elements of conduct display their own distinctive and unique
coherences.
To develop this matter of excavating, let us consider one example. One of
the most influential of scholars stemming from the Chicago School, Erving
Goffman and his work also would seem to be a natural ally for the early
ethnomethodologists. In particular, both argued for the significance of studies
of everyday life, and both focused on the omnirelevance of social accountability
(Garfinkel 1952:357; Goffman 1955:213). However, while Goffman’s researches
stressed the normative and moral aspects of accountability, they largely

overlooked, or left unexcavated, the methodic basis through which persons rec-
ognize states of affairs in common. The substantive result was an excessive reli-
ance on conformity to rules, everyday ritual enactments, and considerations of
“face” as forms of explanation (Wieder, Zimmerman, and Raymond 2010:134).
Methodologically, the consequence was over-reliance on the “as if ” metaphor of
dramaturgy and game analogic reasoning, which tended to drain social actions
of their inherent temporality and contingency. As leveled at Goffman, this cri-
tique appears in Garfinkel’s (1967b:165–67; cf. Maynard 1991) discussion of
Agnes. It is also a central matter in his study of jury decision-making, where he
proposes that jurors, who are taught and espouse an “official line” (Garfinkel
1967c:108–9) or set of rules to follow, in fact give retrospective definition to
their decisions: “The outcome comes before the decision” (Garfinkel 1967c:114).
And Garfinkel (1967c:114) further proposes that members in daily life—not just
jurors—are
. . . more preoccupied with the problem of assigning outcomes their legitimate

history than with the question of deciding before the actual occasion of choice
the conditions under which one, among a set of alternative possible course of
action, will be elected.
Among the classic ethnographic, ethnomethodological studies that are a funda-

mental part of ethnomethodology’s legacies along these lines are Zimmerman’s
(1970) investigation of the “practicalities of rule use” in a welfare agency, and
Wieder’s (1974) probing of the “convict code” in a halfway house for ex-
convicts.10 Besides being mentioned earlier, these studies have been well-sum-
marized in other literature (e.g., Heritage 1984),11 such that only a brief review
is necessary. Situating himself in the intake department of a welfare agency,
Zimmerman watched as clerks worked with the bureaucratic rules for assigning
welfare candidates to specific social workers, which they were to do in a serial
way, using a pencil and paper chart and keeping the workload equal among the
staff. As in any organization, due to a variety of clients, workers, scheduling, and
other circumstance, the bureaucratic system often did not work, and required
the clerks to adapt the rules in ways that could be seen to violate them. However,
such violation was true only in an abstract way; Zimmerman (1970) excavated
the bureaucratic schema to show its embeddedness in situated departures that
preserved an orientation to “reasonable” compliance on behalf of managing the
allocation problem. Neither formal nor informal rules of the setting could ac-
count for the range of accommodations that clerks were able to make. Yet, fol-
lowing the clerks’ own orientations, Zimmerman (1970) concluded that they
did not flout the rules, but rather included them as features in a wider array of
decision-making practices by which they preserved a sense of administrative

order in the work setting.
In ethnographic studies of prisons and related carceral institutions, it has been
traditional to make reference to the convict code, understood as a set of maxims
that covered conduct as directed toward other parolees and the custodial staff.
In his study of a halfway house for paroled narcotics offenders, Wieder (1974)
initially took this traditional approach, in which his ethnographic investigation
portrayed an “authorized or legitimate normative order” at the halfway house
that prescribed behavior aimed at rehabilitating the residents, which was op-
posed by a “convict code” that prescribed conduct that undermined or subverted
the rehabilitative goals of the house. The convict code (“do not snitch” or tell on
another resident, “do not cop out” or admit wrongdoing, “share what you have,”
etc.) prohibited compliance with the official goals.
However, in the transformative second half of his ethnography, Wieder (1974)
supplanted the explanatory approach wherein rules are treated as exogenous to
situated conduct, or as context-free determinants of behavior, by re-embedding
the code to show how it was a lived feature at specific times and places wherein
residents “told” the code. Remarkably, and despite their highly divergent
interests, both residents and staff used the code to identify, describe, interpret,
and circumvent the conduct they encountered, or anticipated encountering, in
the halfway house. As Wieder (1974:131) puts it, since inmates and staff alike
employed the code both to recognize and to explain actions and events with the
halfway house, “. . . the causal analyses of actions by reference to rules might
effectively be examined as interactional events.” Such events involve actions—
often persuasive or justifying ones (cf. Heritage 1984:203–4)—in which a telling
of the code operated, and Wieder (1974:Chapter 5) coined the term “folk so-
ciology” to capture such events. Per Wieder’s (1974) excavation of the code, it
was a feature rather than cause of how residents and staff conducted activities
together. Analytically, the code is embedded in practical activity—an assemblage
of methodic actions whose deployment is undergirded by what Schütz (1962)
called the attitude of daily life (cf. Emirbayer and Mische 1998). As such, it is
these practices that are morally encompassing, and not the code per se.
As will be clear, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological impetus is just as trans-
formative for ethnographic research as it is for the normative theories of Talcott
Parsons. The notions that best capture this transformation are again those of
accountability and reflexivity (discussed earlier). Wieder (1974:203) quotes
Garfinkel on this matter:
. . . members’ accounts, of every sort, in all their logical modes, with all their
uses, and for every method for their assembly are constitutive features of the
settings they make observable. (1967g:8)
The excavation of sociological resources, including those utilized in the best eth-
nographic research of the time, as exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman
or other Chicago School ethnographers, requires a kind of gestalt switch on the
part of the investigator. To capture “members’ accounts”—such as their orien-
tation to bureaucratic rules or their recitations of a code of conduct—as a fea-
ture that is inside rather than somehow acting as a cultural or cognitive matter
outside of, but guiding human conduct, requires an analytic shift in which rules
or codes are embedded in a social scene rather than serving as its backdrop.
More current studies in an ethnographic vein but with an ethnomethodolog-
ical rather than Chicago School sensibility can be found in Liberman’s (2013)
investigations of crossing the street, following “sketched” maps, participating
in board games, managing intercultural conversations, coffee tasting, and others.
For other studies that combine ethnography and CA, see Maynard (1984) and
Maynard and Turowetz (2022).
In sum, the distinctive feature of ethnomethodological ethnography has been
its radical excavation—unearthing material, interactional practices that are oth-
erwise abstracted, made transcendental, and obscured through the launching of
theories, methods, and concepts into the rarefied atmosphere of sociological dis-
course. Even when the celestial bodies of rules and norms in the atmosphere of
sociological discourse (as collected in the amorphous concept of “culture,” for
example) are said to come from direct social experience, as rendered from obser-
vation and interview or other techniques of the interpretive paradigm and eth-
nography, excavation is needed to prioritize the realm of actual activity, rather
than activity generalized, conceptualized, operationalized, measured, corre-
lated with other abstractions, and the rest. Actual practices are the participant-
produced, immensely variegated, deeply detailed, real and actual contours of
socially organized actions-in-interaction. The attractiveness of such autochtho-
nous inquiry, originating Garfinkel’s work, has drawn practitioners to investi-
gate a number of social arenas with ethnomethodology’s tools and orientations,
whether ethnographically or by way of CA and MCD analyses. These arenas in-
clude legal environments, scientific investigations, and studies of work.
Studies of Legal Environments
The very term “ethnomethodology,” we noted earlier, arose in the context of

Garfinkel’s (1967c) study of juries, which set the standard for subsequent socio-
legal studies, insofar as the study posited how, given an “official juror line” or set
of instructions by which they are to decide a case, jurors actually make decisions.
Whereas they might be thought to substitute “jury rules” for the common-sense
ways in which they make more mundane decisions, in fact the jurors drew on
their everyday practices for articulating the official line in relation to a case
at hand. As Garfinkel (1967c:110) noted, “a person is 95 per cent juror before
he comes near the court.” This is because they cannot “know beforehand the
conditions under which they will elect any one of a set of alternative courses of
action” (Garfinkel 1967c:113). Instead, their decisions emerge in and through the
endemic way that decision-making is done in real time, as information emerges
and therefore as actors developmentally discover the “nature” of the situation in
which they find themselves. This is why, as noted earlier, jurors can be seen to de-
fine their decisions retrospectively. The beforehand means by which they achieve
some outcome are the “ethnomethods” of the situation.
In no small part, the jury study was an argument against game theory in eco-
nomics, including its preoccupation with decision-making under risk according
to expected utilities of possible outcomes and associated preferences. Once
Garfinkel excavated such decision-making from the realm of hypostasized cog-
nitive states, inferences, or, in slightly more current terms, “heuristics,” it opened
the door for a wide variety of studies regarding law and its operation in actual
action, rather than according to how behavior accords with “law on the books”
and how actors may comport themselves in relation to such law and the utilities
of conforming or not. Classic in this regard are Bittner’s studies of peacekeeping
on skid row (Bittner 1967b) and of apprehending mentally ill individuals
(Bittner 1967a). In both studies, Bittner shows that “keeping peace” and making
apprehensions occur not in accord with any strict interpretation of law—in-
deed, there is great reluctance to rely on legal stipulations. Rather, police make
judgments about when to use the law in conjunction with other practices that
keep locales peaceful, organized, and orderly. Officers of the law seek detailed
knowledge about people and areas under their jurisdiction that allows them
to assess risk for the area, rather than culpability as such. So, the task involves
common sense, is practical, and situated. As Bittner (1967a:291; cf. Meehan
2018, our emphasis) observes, “. . . it is possible that an officer who merely com-
plies with the law may nevertheless be found to be an incompetent practitioner
of his craft.”
A wide variety of studies embracing legal, law enforcement, and forensic
contexts flowed from these early investigations. Concerned with the enforce-
ment of a “Civil Sidewalk Ordinance” in “Garden City,” Chapter 6 by Raymond
et al. in this volume is directly in this line of research. An extensive number of
journal publications include further studies of policing (Meehan 1986, 1987),
courtroom processes (Drew 1992; Komter 1994; Liberman 1981; Seuren 2019),
congressional hearings (Lynch and Bogen 1996; Molotch and Boden 1985), 911
emergency dispatch systems (Bittner 1967b), the jury room (Manzo 1995, 1996;
Maynard and Manzo 1993; Pomerantz and Sanders 2013), and consultations and
negotiations conducted outside of the courtroom (David, Rawls, and Trainum

2017; Kashimura 2015; Komter 2003; M. E. Lynch 1982; Maynard 1982; Maynard
and Schelly 2017). Besides two edited books in this vein of law-related ethno-
methodology and CA research, an earlier volume (Travers and Manzo 1997),
and a more recent one (Dupret, Lynch, and Berard 2015), there are monograph
treatments of legal settings that combine ethnomethodology and CA to explicate
the interactional groundings of plea negotiations (Maynard 1984) and court-
room inquiry (Atkinson and Drew 1979).
In the latter vein, Atkinson and Drew (1979), use transcripts from an English
tribunal of inquiry, in which a Belfast police of officer is cross-examined about
his involvement in disturbances in that city in 1969. The analytic problem is how
lawyers build lines of questioning to develop accusations and how witnesses
respond with “justifications” and “excuses.” In an extensive post-hoc analysis
of US congressional hearings concerned with an affair in the 1980s in which
moneys had been diverted from a plan to free US hostages in Iran to fund rebels
in then-socialist Nicaragua, Lynch and Bogen (1996) show how the main target
of inquiry, Oliver North, was able to subvert the ordinary courtroom question-
answer discourse and its historicizing tenor through detailed manipulations of
that discourse on behalf of obscuring his agency in the matters, and especially
through a practice the authors identify as accomplishing “plausible deniability.”
This was despite investigators’ use of what Lynch and Bogen (1996) call a “docu-
mentary method of interrogation.”
Also in the domain of law is Lynch et al.’s (2008) study of DNA profiling and,
more specifically, courtroom dialogues and trial summaries in which challenges
to the use of DNA evidence occur. A central aspect of the study deals with the
discussions, in these dialogues and summaries, of protocols for DNA testing,
both to bolster the science but also to undermine it when efforts are made to
show the lack of compliance with those protocols. Another aspect is how courts
may distinguish between “common-sense” evidence (such as eyewitness testi-
mony) and “scientific” corroboration (such as DNA testing).
It could be said that early ethnomethodology was primarily ethnographic,
but in the distinctive vein of excavating what previously had been resources
for legal and other investigations—notions of codes, norms, laws and other
constructs—and, à la Zimmerman and Pollner (1970), turning them into
topics for inquiry in field studies. Later ethnomethodological studies in legal
settings began to rely on audio and video recordings along with texts, official
records, DNA profiles, and other artifacts to encompass a wide variety of
analytic resources. Such studies anticipate, and in some cases, coincide with
ethnomethodological developments in the areas of science, technology, and
“workplaces.”
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies III: Science, Technology,

Workplace Studies
Overall, the Lynch et al. study of DNA fingerprinting, as it traces how controver-
sies over DNA profiling have come to a kind of closure regarding its validity in
both law and science, forms a bridge between ethnomethodological studies of legal
environments and those related to laboratory science and workplaces. Indeed,
Lynch (Chapter 4 this volume) situates ethnomethodological science studies in
Garfinkel’s larger “studies of work” program, describing the compatibility of ethno-
methodological science and technology investigations with the “strong program”
emerging from the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh in the
1970s, which proposed the relevance of sociological studies taking on the actual
content of the natural sciences and not just constructs such as norms, incentives,
and networking relationships surrounding laboratory and related investigations.
Also compatible with the strong program were ethnographies of scientific work
(cf. Knorr-Cetina 1983; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Traweek 1988). However, these
latter works were more along the lines of social constructionist approaches in sci-
ence studies, as analytically they also incorporated social and political structures
beyond the lab itself as driving forces for science (cf. Button and Sharrock 1993;
Lynch 1993:Chapters 2–3; Lynch, Chapter 4 in this volume).
Ethnomethodological studies of science had a different target: “the effort
to observe, describe, and explain ‘actual’ scientific practice in situ . . .” (Lynch
1993:113). Garfinkel’s harnessing of the documentary method of interpretation
and the critique regarding the essential incompleteness of language, rules, in-
struction manuals, and other human artifacts formed the background for the
study of interpretive elaboration in concrete contexts. The recognition of this in-
completeness and need for understanding detailed forms of competence may go
back to Garfinkel’s work with the US Air Force in the 1940s (Garfinkel [1962]
2019; Rawls and Lynch 2019; see later discussion in this chapter). However,
Garfinkel eventually drew on Husserl’s (1970) discussion of the mathematiza-
tion of the natural world initiated by Galileo. As Lynch notes, Husserl viewed
Galileo’s findings:
. . . as the end products of an iterative “polishing” through which experimental

actions, equipment, measures and mathematical analysis were brought to-
gether. Only after the phenomenal elements in the experimental field are sta-
bilized through a disciplined and repetitive praxis does the mathematical law
become apparent as what was always the case. (1993:119)
While Husserl sought to locate the ultimate foundations of these processes

in the operations of a transcendental ego, Garfinkel and his students developed
an approach that treated scientific actions as the locally organized “assemblages

of acts situated in discursive and embodied articulations of a world that is
always and already shot through with meaning” (Lynch 1993:125). These
domains, as Lynch (this volume, Chapter 4, page 115) notes, “. . . also explicate
their own methodologies: canonical procedures, organizational standards, and
constituent practices.”
Overall, it can be said that Garfinkel (2007; cf. Garfinkel and Liberman
2007) drew on Husserl but radicalized his phenomenological inquiries with his
own orientation to the Lebenswelt origins of the sciences12—the grounding of
Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in case-specific, lived work and work-
site “haecceities” or specifics and particularities of investigatory conduct.
By way of investigation of courses of inquiry and action in laboratory science—
an array of situated natural language and bodily practices “intertwining” with the
object of investigation—Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston (1981) set the stage for
ethnomethodological studies of work (“workplace studies”) that emerged in the
1980s and beyond, and which we discuss in the following. Drawing on audio
recordings, Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston (1981) were concerned with the
ways in which astronomers in 1969 discovered a pulsar (neutron star emitting
radio waves). Among other contributions emanating from this work are Lynch’s
(1985, 1988; 1982) and Lynch, Livingston, and Garfinkel’s (1983) examinations
concerning how biologists prepare, work with, and talk about various forms
of biological and neurological data. As Lynch (1985:1) has put it, such studies,
by gaining access to orderly features of actual, embodied, temporally consti-
tuted scientific practice that escape both lab investigators’ own methodological
discussions and studies of science that traditionally have eschewed work-specific
practices, construe their phenomenon as “the social accomplishment of natural
scientific order.” Constitutive forms of shop work and shop talk, accomplishing
specific tasks, are assembled not according to plans or written accounts, but
as ways of meeting circumstances, handling trouble, paying attention to other
matters such as tissue cultures, samples, photographic traces, charts, using for-
mulae, and so on, that make competent task performance an invariably unique
achievement (cf. Lynch and Woolgar 1990).13
More recently, Greiffenhagen’s (2014) highlighting of the work of black-
board inscription relative to “doing and thinking” mathematics, and Sormani’s
(2016) study of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) in the field of exper-
imental physics related to complex superconductivity (see also Sormani,
Chapter 12 in this volume) find their place within the studies of science impulse.
Sormani’s (2016) research is related to other investigations that highlight not
just the talk in a work setting such as a lab, but also material engagements and
practices of the body that operate on materiality (cf. Livingston 2008; Whalen
1995). Such research is related to what is called multimodal analysis, combining
ethnomethodological inquiry with CA techniques in a variety of public and in-

stitutional settings (Fasulo and Monzoni 2009; Goodwin 2017; Koschmann et al.
2011; Mondada 2016; Nishizaka 2011, 2014).
Representing the multimodal line of inquiry in the present volume is
Goodwin’s Chapter 7, which demonstrates ways in which semiotic resources,
including talk and its lexico-semantic structures, prosody, gaze, body organiza-
tion, can be layered together for complex social actions ranging from pre-ado-
lescent arguing (cf. Goodwin and Goodwin 1987), to achieving understanding
when a stroke limits a co-participant’s speech to three words, to recognizing,
for archaeological purposes, disturbances in the earth or color matches be-
tween a Munsell chart and a dirt sample. Similarly, Mondada’s Chapter 11 in this
volume draws on ethnomethodology for the ways in which indexical expressions
gain their meaning for the organization of joint courses of conduct not just
through vocalizations, but also by way of embodied details that are the site of
orderly—methodic—contributions to that organization. These include aspects
of grammar, such as syntax, gaze, gesture, body posturing, and even the mobili-
zation of bodies (walking while talking, to put it vernacularly), which are sugges-
tive of the temporal construction of interaction.
Although studies of science in the ethnomethodology tradition have linkages
to explorations of scientific discourse, such as Mulkay and Gilbert’s (1982,
1984) research on the asymmetric ways by which investigators account for error
as opposed to truth in their studies, strict ethnomethodological studies of sci-
ence are more akin to Livingston’s (1986, 1987) analyses of the lived work of
proving mathematical theorems, which demonstrate that schedules of equations
and diagrams represent only one part of a mathematical proof. Proofs consist of
the linking such formulae with embodied courses of inference and action that
are essential to the proof ’s intelligibility, coherence, and technical adequacy. For
Livingston (1987:117), this stance implies the pairing between mathematical
or scientific discoveries and the “familiar, ordinary, ignored circumstances and
substance” existing in the practices that make such discoveries possible. As they
exist “in and as” the inhabited doing of a proof or discovery, those practices are
not recoverable by way of retrospection, explication, exposition, explanation, or
other such means. They are the achieved structure of detail by which a proof or
discovery has a lived accountability.
Workplace Studies: Organizations
Out of the ethnomethodological approach to science emerged “studies of work,”

or more succinctly, “workplace studies.” These inquiries connect with tradi-
tional concerns in sociology about organizations, and, early on, Bittner (1965)
had established that ethnomethodologically inspired agenda, eschewing preva-

lent ideas that organizations are orderly environments either according to their
formal rules or, when discrepancies from formal rule-adherence happen, because
of an orientation to the informal normative environment. Instead, suggested
Bittner (1965:242–46), the common-sense environment wherein actors’ “adap-
tive and cooperative manipulations”—the “unsaid” and ceteris paribus and other
practical orientations—were in need of sociological appreciation. Accordingly,
workplace studies are a direct descendant of this investigatory strategy, as is seen
in Suchman’s (2011) more recent formulation:
Rather than seeing the specificities of the lived world as in need of analytic
reworking—into generalizations, abstractions, formalizations and the like—
that then order and explain the concreteness, ethnomethodological studies
take as their topic just how, specifically, the work of ordering (including but not
limited to its technologies of analysis) gets done. (2011:23)
Remarkably, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC, now known
only as PARC), Suchman in 1979, with colleagues such as Jeanette Blomberg
(1987) and Julian Orr (1996), pioneered such studies within a group that has
had additions and departures (including Suchman’s) over the years, but which
remains intact with different personnel today. Orr (2006:1807), in particular,
cites his indebtedness to Bittner’s (1965) “seminal piece” on organizations, and
developed the notion of “improvisation” among technicians, customers, and
machines. Improvisation, paradoxically, makes possible the implementation of
otherwise choreographed action sequences in teleservice centers, such as those
concerned with providing aid to users who are experiencing on-site difficulties
with a company’s machines—e.g., printers and copiers (Whalen and Vinkhuyzen
2000; Whalen, Whalen, and Henderson 2002).
Themes in workplace studies, which include attention to a variety of computer-
based systems, have ramified into computer- supported cooperative work
(CSCW), human computer interaction (HCI), and other studies of technology
and how it is embedded in work settings and in the practical actions of users and
consumers alike (Button 1993). Studies of work include Button and Sharrock’s
(1996, 1998) investigations of software engineering, design options in the print
industry (Button and Sharrock 1997), and human-computer interaction (Button
and Sharrock 2009). Whalen et al. (2004:208) innovatively analyze what they call
“workscapes”—how interaction in “the work of the world . . . entails engagement
with the material features of settings; with technologies, artifacts, the physical
configuration of buildings or other social spaces, and the like.” A potentially al-
lied subfield is that concerned with “distributed cognition,” and the ways in which
“thinking” is not an individual activity so much as it involves interrelationships
among practitioners, whose work-related actions are a collective, collaborative

endeavor (Hutchins 1995; Luff, Hindmarsh, and Heath 2000a:14; cf. Saloman
1996). From a strict ethnomethodological point of view (Button 2008; Luff et al.
2000a:13–14), however, studies in the distributed cognition field retain an un-
comfortable emphasis on “cognition” as such, by simply extending its boundaries
beyond the individual rather than fully engaging socially organized practices, in
situ forms of joint reasoning, and hands-on activities.
About the ethnomethodological CA contribution in these various areas, Luff
et al. (2000a:15) observe, “. . . it is perhaps ethnomethodology and conversation
analysis, more than any other analytic orientation, which had the most prevailing
influence on these workplace studies and more generally, social science research
in CSCW.” Indeed, studies emanating from the King’s College group (e.g., Heath
and Luff 2000; Luff, Hindmarsh, and Heath 2000b) have been on the forefront,
with research across diverse settings, from traffic control rooms to document
machines, financial institutions, engineering, medicine, journalism, archi-
tecture, and other domains, including the auctioning of fine art and antiques
(Heath 2013) and art appreciation in museums and galleries (vom Lehn, Heath,
and Hindmarsh 2001). And, in our volume, see Heath and Luff ’s Chapter 15 on
closed circuit TV surveillance.
Still more ramifications of workplace studies relate to “activity theory” and
“course of action” analysis in cognitive science, whose endeavors are to excavate
tacit, unexplicated, and taken-for-granted practices related to human-computer
interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and other
domains. As with the early ethnographic ethnomethodology studies, the thrust
has been to examine how plans, schedules, and other rules of procedure are not
maxims by which to abide, but rather are made to happen within on-the-ground
practices. Classic ethnomethodology and CA studies in this domain include
those by Suchman (1987, 2007) on the design of artificial intelligence in relation
to copying machines, Heath and Luff (1992) on the management of a multimedia
work environment, especially the temporal aspects of managing the weekday
rush hours for the London Underground, and many other investigations.
Ethnographies of work and practice include an edited collection of case studies
(Szymanski and Whalen 2011), another collection regarding practices for man-
aging task flows in various organizational settings (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh
2010), and studies of meetings (Barnes 2007; Boden 1994; Ford 2008; Svennevig
2008, 2012). There are investigations of surgery work (Koschmann et al. 2011;
Mondada 2014), museum attendance and withdrawal (vom Lehn 2013), auction-
eering (Heath 2013), ethnographic monographs such as Harper’s (1998) study of
the International Monetary Fund, and still more almost too numerous to men-
tion (and again, in this volume, see Mondada, Chapter 11, and Heath and Luff,
Chapter 15). Often such studies have involved collaboration with practitioners,
and coming to grips with a variety of technologies, documents, artifacts, and

designs that incorporate mobile, digital, as well as material objects in both home
and specialized settings that include forms of professional expertise. Included
here is a recent study (Moore and Arar 2019) concerned with drawing on CA
knowledge of interactional patterns to develop more effective natural language-
based interactions between machines—online programs and services—and
human users.
Related to workplace studies, but outside of organizations traditionally con-
ceived, are Sudnow’s (1978) classic portrayal of learning to play improvisational
jazz piano, Macbeth’s (1992) delineation of the “floor” as a material object and
“creature of local history” in managing classroom interaction and instruc-
tion, and many other contributions. Overall, like the ethnomethodological
investigations of science, workplace studies explicate mundane details of the
practices that inhabit natural settings in which professionals, staff, and others
perform a wide variety of tasks associated with accomplishing the mandates of
those settings. In Button and Sharrock’s (1998:97) terms, such investigations do
not so much provide a “sociology of ” the worksite, as much as they may pro-
duce a characterization and analysis of “sociology in” the worksite. Members of
work settings are artful practitioners who deploy situated forms of sociological
expertise to meet their organizational mandates. Workplace inquiries involve
how participants get their work done by taking into account not just what is op-
timal for the organization, but also what is feasible and practicable in the setting.
Scheduling, budgetary, local and externally imposed technological affordances,
hands-on manageability, and a multitude of other concrete considerations all
come under ethnomethodological scrutiny.
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies IV: Statistics, Surveys, and

Social Problems
In many ways, ethnomethodological studies of work have predecessors in

Garfinkel’s and others’ investigations of research procedures in social science.
Since World War II in the United States, an overwhelming amount of inquiry has
depended on such methodological staples as survey research, statistical mod-
eling, and sophisticated computation. “These methods,” Garfinkel (1967d:101)
observes, “are intended to depict the ways of transforming common sense situ-
ations into calculable ones.” Such methods, however, leave behind how the end
products of such research and the depiction of social structure that they help to
achieve are inseparable from common-sense practices. It is these tacit practices
of members (researchers and subjects) that form the very ground upon
which study findings and the methodologies generating them depend. These
members’ practices, therefore, are deserving of sociological investigation in

their own right.
At the very beginning of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel discusses this
matter in his research at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. Taking on the
classical sociological problem of suicide, this study poses the issue of how, given
cases of “sudden, unnatural death,” the office could decide whether the death was
something self-inflicted or another kind of death. Analytically, such a decision
is not one that could be characterized according to rules of rational decision-
making, hypothesis testing, or other abstract procedures. Instead, Garfinkel’s
excavation of taken-for-granted ways of assembling categories of death shows
that this work involves managing a variety of contingencies connected
. . . to the terms of employment, to various internal and external chains of re-

portage, supervision, and review, and to similar organizationally supplied “pri-
orities of relevances” for assessments of what “realistically,” “practically,” or
“reasonably” needed to be done and could be done, how quickly, with what re-
sources, seeing whom, talking about what, for how long, and so on. (1967d:13)
With inspiration from Garfinkel, Douglas (1967) and Atkinson (1978), as

discussed earlier in this chapter, developed more extensive studies of suicide
statistics, calling into question just how valid the well-known, purported rates
(such as differences between Catholics and Protestants) are when so little is
known about their generation by way of actual practices involved in their as-
sembly.14 As Heritage (1984:175) observes in his review of this literature, “Pared
to a minimum, the claim is that interpretative processes of unknown scope and
variety . . . are necessarily implemented in ‘making sense’ of sociological data.”
In exploring the situated ways in which data are generated, Garfinkel’s (1967d)
primary goal was neither to provide a broadband critique of official statistics,
nor to undermine the studies whose findings are based on them. The point was
to make available a different order of social organization, one whose investiga-
tion could better situate and make intelligible our usual forms of social inquiry
(Garfinkel 1967d; cf. Heritage 1984:176). In this light, coding procedures—a
prominent feature of survey research and statistical analysis—also came under
Garfinkel’s (1967d:20–24) lens, which revealed how the procedures involve both
prior knowledge of the organization and the circumstances under study, along
with a variety of “ad hocing” devices (“et cetera,” “unless,” “let it pass,” etc.),
whereby even the most detailed coding instructions could be followed. Again,
it is not that the coding phase of a large study is somehow undermined, but how
a level of social organization exists essentially and irremediably on the ground,
in the practical, detailed ways that coders follow rules of procedure. These prac-
tical ways can be excavated ethnomethodologically. Examples include Meehan’s
(1986) study of police record-keeping, Heath and Luff ’s (2000:Chapter 2) re-

search on records in general medicine, Kameo and Whalen’s (2015) analysis of
incident record forms in calls to police and fire communication centers, and
Turowetz and Maynard’s (2019) examination of records in a diagnostic clinic
for autism.
Coding procedures address the problem of measuring social phenomena, but
the phenomena of measurement inhabit every scientific discipline, and in eth-
nomethodology there are different stances that have addressed the phenomena
(Lynch 1991). CA perspectives on survey measurement include Suchman and
Jordan (1990), Schegloff (2002), and, more generally, Schaeffer (1991), Schaeffer
and Maynard (1996), and Drew, Raymond, and Weinberg (2006). With re-
gard to social sciences, Cicourel’s (1964) Method and Measurement in Sociology
took a broadscale approach, one that has been called “critical remediation” (cf.
Lynch 1991:84; Maynard and Schaeffer 2000:333), suggesting that survey re-
search depends upon unexamined common-sense constructs that inhabit and
distort research findings. Garfinkel’s (1967d:98) own approach to survey re-
search, in its concern for the “ad hoc tactics” for adjusting to actual situations
of interviewing, drew on the notion of the documentary method. In managing
the “practical exigencies” through which interviewers adjust their “questions in
profitable sequence while retaining some control over the unknown and unde-
sirable directions in which affairs, as a function of the course of the actual ex-
change, may actually move,” researchers could generate the “reasonableness” of
their findings. This stance was not a remedial one, and the issues that Cicourel
(1964) and related critiques (e.g., Mishler 1986) have raised are only too well-
known to survey methodologists, such that outsider commentary and critique
are “news from nowhere” (Garfinkel 2002:249).
Instead of remediation, an approach can be taken in which there is dialogue
between survey practitioners and ethnomethodological or CA investigators in
which something like what Garfinkel (2002:126) called “hybrid” investigations
(cf. Luff et al. 2000b) can proceed. Collaborative work can both further iden-
tify and provide for the possibility of remedying what is known as measurement
error in survey studies (Maynard and Schaeffer 2002; Schaeffer and Maynard
2009), as in the Mair et al. (2006) examination of problems with, and solutions
for, survey-based self-reported smoking behaviors. Garfinkel showed himself
to be interested in such studies, as when he contributed to a long-standing col-
laborative effort regarding survey measurement and posed researchable issues
surrounding what he coined as “the surveyable society” (Maynard 2012). That
society is one which so organizes itself, through the concreteness of everyday,
embodied procedures at the level of both professional and lay forms of expertise
in combination with one another, to provide for what may emerge as the repro-
ducibility of (valid for all practical purposes) findings.
Building on Garfinkel’s basic inquiry into the assembly of social scientific data
are other recent studies of statistical and survey methodologies, and also qualita-
tive methodologies (Greiffenhagen, Mair, and Sharrock 2012). In Chapter 13 of
this volume, Mair, Sharrock, and Greiffenhagen examine the situated practices
related to “doing research with numbers,” and elsewhere have published a
“working bibliography” (Mair, Greiffenhagen, and Sharrock 2013) of social
studies of social science, while Maynard and Schaeffer (2000, 2002), drawing
heavily on the survey methodological literature, extant social studies of science
and technology (STS), ethnomethodology and CA, extended studies of (nat-
ural) science to elaborate social studies of social scientific knowledge (SSSK),
and “standardization in interaction.” Addressing a different vein of classic so-
cial science methodology is Livingston and Heritage’s Chapter 14 in this volume
on the phenomenon of praxeological reasoning, collaboratively undertaken in
situations of investigative uncertainty. In this case, the ties to Garfinkel’s (1967d)
jury study develop another facet of scientific reasoning, which is how the matter
of accountability for “findings” of any kind depend as much on the ways that
participants hold one another accountable in their public forms of reasoning as
they do on any purported relationship between “what actually happened” and
their determinations of fact.
Social Problems, Deviance, Disability, and

Social Constructionism
The early work of Garfinkel (1967d) on research procedures in the social sci-
ences stimulated a long but different tradition concerned with social problems
and deviance. That early work was sifted through Cicourel’s (1964) Method
and Measurement and especially his investigation of juvenile justice (1968),
which shows how common-sense concepts regarding “wrongdoing,” typ-
ical perpetrators and their backgrounds, the meaning of legal statutes, and
other embedded facets of law enforcement work generate objective-seeming
distributions of crime. The theme of this book—its examination of the in
situ, socially organized ways of counting offenses, rather than just their dis-
tribution according to conventional categorizations—echoed the collabora-
tive Cicourel and Kitsuse (1963) approach that mapped the routes by which
educational professionals define, classify, and funnel high school students to
college vs. non-college careers. Rather than taking distributions at face value,
the approach is to decompose “student types” and rates into the common-
sense constructs by which personnel interpret and categorize incidents and
behaviors involving students along different lines and for subsequent educa-
tional careers.
In turn, as Schneider (2019:184) has observed, the Cicourel-Kitsuse collab-

oration influenced the subsequent development of Spector and Kitsuse’s (1977)
distinctively “constructionist” view of social problems. In a phenomenolog-
ical sense, and although not articulating their argument this way, Spector and
Kitsuse (1977:75) “bracketed” the notion that social problems could be defined
objectively as states of the society, and suggested that analysis needed to con-
sider “the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and
claims with respect to some putative conditions.” The constructionist approach
to deviance highlighted how claims-makers may create rules, deem behavior as
in violation of such rules, and sanction the rule violators, the view being that
conditions and behaviors are not inherently bad or deviant, and instead are des-
ignated as such through concrete historical and social processes. Dorothy Smith’s
(1978) remarkable paper titled “K is mentally ill” links itself to this tradition and
delineates a complex practice involving “contrast structures” by which accounts
of a person’s (“K’s”) behavior come to be seen as exhibits of a mental illness.
In this volume, Darin Weinberg (Chapter 9) portrays how, at the time of
Garfinkel’s (1967d) landmark publication, social problems research had been
“polarized” between those who, taking an externalized perspective on crime
and its statistics, were committed to a scientistic image of sociology as value-free
and detached, and those who, like Becker (1963), Sykes and Matza (1957) and
others, by showing the social worlds of “deviants” to be organized and worthy
of analysis in their own right, were working to incorporate a sociological under-
standing of arenas that, from the outside, appeared disorganized and abnormal.
The Becker et al. position was one that emphasized the ways in which deviance
and social problems come to be perceived or treated as such. Ethnomethodology
would seem to be an attractive tool in this endeavor, and many sought to as-
similate ethnomethodology to what became another classic in the field, Berger
and Luckmann’s (1967) The Social Construction of Reality. However, while
both endeavors reflect the influence of the social phenomenologist Alfred
Schütz (1962), Garfinkel’s endeavors depart from the cognitivism of Berger and
Luckmann (1967) to excavate a procedural approach to the accomplishment
of mutual understanding and intersubjectivity (Button and Sharrock 1991; cf.
Heritage 1984:97–100; Lynch 1993:133–41). This included the meaningfulness
of conduct to participants and the imposition of deviance categories from the
inside—according to what Sudnow (1965:255), in his classic study of “normal
crimes,” has called the “actual operations of the administrative legal system.”
Furthermore, from an ethnomethodological point of view, Pollner’s (1974b)
approach to the traffic court and critique of labeling theory in the work of
Becker (1963) capture the dilemma inherent in the constructionist approach
(cf. Woolgar and Pawluch 1985). By suggesting that social problems and devi-
ance exist only if and to the extent that there is a “societal reaction” to them,
labeling theory aims to critique “common-sense” versions of social problems and

deviance that assume their objective existence. However, labeling theory itself
confronts a dilemma whereby, if actions are deviant only through the reactions to
them, the reactionary behavior is elevated to the realm of an explanatory mech-
anism that abrogates analysis of what happens on the ground in real situations of
deviance determination. Pollner (1974a:37) proposes that, instead of critiquing
the common-sense approach, ethnomethodology analysis takes into account
how that approach is a feature of the societal reaction. Those who label do not see
themselves as creating deviance; rather they view themselves as “confronting an
order of events whose character . . . is presupposed as independent” of their own
responses.
Related to the area of deviance and social problems is that of disability. The
literature is partly reviewed in Maynard and Turowetz’s Chapter 17 in this
volume; see also Maynard and Turowetz (2022). Pollner and McDonald-Wikler’s
(1985) study of a family with a developmentally disabled child documented how
members worked to sustain the sense of her competence, while Goode’s (1994)
study focused on two girls who had suffered rubella syndrome and were deaf,
blind, and (as the title of the book suggests) “without words”—alingual. As a ser-
vice provider and participant observer, Goode provides an analysis that involves
what might be called ethnomethodological depth ethnography, an exploration
of the girls’ lived experience that depends on his own embodied conduct with
them to explore the possibility of achieving intersubjectivity when spoken lan-
guage is not available. Later in the 1990s, Robillard (1999), drawing heavily on
his ethnomethodological training with Garfinkel, published a volume about his
own experiences with motor neuron disease (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s
disease). The monograph reveals a detailed understanding of the lived work
of managing this disease and dealing with interactions, emotions, stigma, and
other challenges. These works can be considered as forerunners of further eth-
nomethodological and CA studies (e.g., Garcia 2012; Goodwin, Chapter 7 in
this volume; Higginbotham and Engelke 2013; Wilkinson, Rae, and Rasmussen
2020) of what have now come to be referred to as “atypical interactions.”
Starting with Garfinkel’s (1949, 1967g) prescient studies of assembling hom-
icide and suicide figures, and coding the contents of clinic folders (Garfinkel
1967g), subsequent research on policing, medicine, education, testing, and diag-
nosis are revelatory in showing the organized, concrete ways in which these ac-
tivities make possible the emergence and documentation of patterns of deviance,
disorder, and disability in the wide society. The jury study (Garfinkel 1967c) as
well has implications for the exploration of members’ ways of making deter-
minations of “what actually happened.” It isn’t that the study thereby provides
access to the way that aggregate patterns of behavior in society emerge. Rather,
the inquiry shows how, per Livingston and Heritage’s Chapter 14 in this volume,
reasoning in small collectivities is not something individual and cognitive. It is

jointly assembled or, in a word, collaborative. Furthermore, early inquiries of
Garfinkel, especially regarding Agnes (Garfinkel 1967b), by drawing attention
to the lived experience of human difference, also made possible subsequent
documentation of orderliness in the ways participants manage their own or
others’ difficulties related to illness and disability in worlds that are made for
more common orientations, methods of making sense, and navigating the built
environment.
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies V: Studies of Being and

Doing: Gender, Race, and Other Identities
Having reviewed ethnomethodological studies and the legacies they offer in

a variety of social scientific arenas, let us return to the matter of gender, and
then consider possible offshoots. First, insofar as gender is at the root of femi-
nist sociology, it is important to recognize the influence of Garfinkel’s work on
Dorothy Smith and what she calls “institutional ethnography.” Although there
are important differences, especially in the way that institutional ethnography
works to bring the “relations of ruling” into the analysis, the starting point for
analysis is one that is shared with ethnomethodology. That point consists of an
aversion to situating analysis “from a position in an abstract Archimedian space
constituted by formal methods,” as Smith (1975:374) remarks, citing Parsons’s
(1937) theorizing as a perspicuous example, and advocating for an analysis that
starts from the world of lived experience. However, from Smith’s (1975) point
of view, that world is only the starting point, and not extensive enough. By way
of Smith’s (1975) contrast with Zimmerman and Pollner’s (1970) notion of the
“occasioned corpus,” and instead of approaching the everyday world frontally,
the idea is to capture organizational properties that are “in back of ” that world
(Smith 1975:368).
If Smith is a critic of ethnomethodology, nevertheless Lemert (2002) has
observed:
It is simply impossible to understand Dorothy Smith’s pioneering work on the

uncertain relations among power, knowledge, and subject position, without
considering her debt to the ethnomethodology of her California student days.
(2002:xii)
Accordingly, Garfinkel’s work has clearly influenced feminist sociology to the

degree that Smith’s (1974, 1975) work forms a linkage from ethnomethod-
ology to subsequent forms of gender and even feminist racial critique (Collins
1989). More than that, due to Garfinkel’s (1967d) inclusion in Studies in

Ethnomethodology of the chapter on “Agnes” (see earlier discussion), the most
enduring of ethnomethodology’s legacies may be in the realm of gender accom-
plishment. As Schilt (2016:287) has put it, “this particular case study found the
broadest audience outside sociology,” and “captured the imagination of social
psychologists, feminist social scientists, queer theorists, and transgender studies
scholars alike.”
Early articulations from the Agnes study for gender studies include espe-
cially Kessler and McKenna’s (1978) constructionist approach, based on their
consideration of biology, childhood development, and transsexualism, and
West and Zimmerman’s (1987:127) highly influential articulation of the “doing”
of gender: “. . . managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions
of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category.” Slightly later, still
drawing on the Agnes study to advance the notion of an “incorrigible” orienta-
tion to gender assignment based on biological sex, Kessler (1998) discussed the
phenomenon of intersexuality or neonatal genital ambiguity and the problems
it presents for medical professionals and families, and later, of course, for those
who are affected.
In subsequent years, with the recognition that Garfinkel’s study of Agnes
is “widely understood to be the first sociological analysis of a transitioning
person . . . the critical body of scholarship in the gender difference paradigm has
developed into a vibrant field of transgender studies in sociology” (Schilt and
Lagos 2017:426), with contributors working to emphasize transgender experi-
ence and subjectivities on their own terms. As Schilt (Chapter 8:224) observes in
this volume, although Garfinkel’s study “challenged the then-dominant sex roles
theory in sociology and called into question the psychological distinction be-
tween normality and dysfunction,” it neglected other “real world consequences”
for gender-nonconforming people. More recent studies have documented mor-
tifying experiences in a variety of institutional contexts, including healthcare
and prison, and in relation to race, class, and religion, thereby addressing issues
of intersectionality (Schilt and Lagos 2017:431). Just as this has happened in the
scholarly realm, so have the visibility of transgender people and related issues of
justice and politics emerged prominently in the wider society. Although it would
be an exaggeration to say that Garfinkel’s study of Agnes and the derivate notion
of “doing gender” are somehow responsible for this outgrowth of transgender
visibility and societal awareness, it is important to note that, as Fenstermaker
(2016:297) has put it, “The assertion of gender as ‘an achieved property of situ-
ated conduct,’ and as an ‘emergent feature of social situations’ is now so much a
part of the mantras invoked in the study of gender as to render quotation marks
gratuitous.”
If ethnomethodology has made major contributions to feminist theory and

to the study of gender, it has had less impact on the sociological, theoretical, or
empirical understanding of other category memberships to which members may
belong or may be assigned.15 However, there are potentials here as well. Perhaps
an overlooked ethnomethodology paper in this vein is Wieder and Pratt’s
(1990:46) “On Being a Recognizable Indian among Indians,” a study that goes
beyond the ways in which one does “being a recognizable Indian,” and relates
that achievement to the generic matter of “the ways that persons make who they
are (or what they are doing) visible and recognizable to others . . . as that kind
of person or of doing that kind of action.” Such an orientation applies to more
“micro” identities or stances, such as standing in line (cf. Garfinkel 2002:215–16;
Garfinkel and Livingston 2003), “doing being” ordinary (Sacks 1984), being a
Japanese person (cf. Mori 2003; Nishizaka 1995), a boy with ADHD (Evaldsson
2014), or a teenager (Weilenmann and Larsson 2000). By engaging the organiza-
tion of action and recognition of action at the level of orderly embodied conduct,
the potentials are strong for connecting to current work in urban ethnography
(Duneier 1999; Duneier and Molotch 1999), and addressing such topics as how
one does “being a black man” (Duck 2015; Jones 2018) or “being an African
American young woman” (Goffman 2014; Jones 2009) in environments of pov-
erty and surveillance (cf. Goodwin 1990) or other spaces, including those that
are characterizably or experientially “white” as well as “black” (Anderson 2015).
In this vein, Garfinkel’s own, early studies of a bus trip and homicide (Garfinkel
1941) are textually about race, and there may be forthcoming papers from the
Garfinkel archive (e.g., Garfinkel 2012) that deal with inequalities of various
sorts and their undermining of reciprocity, mutuality, and trust that make for
fully coherent, mutual understanding (see Rawls, Chapter 3 in this volume;
Rawls and Duck 2020). One study from the archive already shows that Garfinkel
was, from early in his career, concerned with issues of inequality. This is evident
in a series of PhD proposals in which he argued that “inequality interferes with
the achievement of sense and self in social interaction” (Turowetz and Rawls
2020:2) because it undermines the trust conditions that make full reciprocity
and mutual understanding possible. That is, in assembling social objects (in-
cluding identities of self and other), it is required that participants not only en-
gage practical actions (assessments, reports, narratives, etc.) in complementary
fashion, but also that these actions are “trusted” in the sense of being taken-for-
granted in reciprocal ways as these actions necessarily are done. Yet, in ordinary
discourse, uses of religious, racial, and other categories may assign or presume
asymmetric dimensions of meaning to the categories such that the possibility of
mutual, egalitarian attributions and concerted actions is foreclosed (Garfinkel
2012; Turowetz and Rawls 2020).
This racial or ethnic dimension to Garfinkel’s work has yet to be fully appre-
ciated and may eventually occasion a better sociological understanding of
marginal identities of various kinds and their dynamics for lived experience.
There may be opportunities for exposing the ways in which these identities as
co-productions can inhibit the marginalized participants from achieving ordi-
nary goals. Or, at least, ethnomethodological studies can highlight how reaching
such achievement depends on managing not only the practices for, but also ex-
traordinary forms of anxiety attendant to, performing “membership” of various
kinds in light of their taken-for-granted features. As with his study of transsexu-
alism, wherein the appreciation of gender accomplishment has been exposed at
an unprecedented level of embodied, interactional detail, so too other identities
may come under the ethnomethodological gaze for their aspects as fraught and
contingent achievements.
Conclusion: Ethnomethodology’s Legacies
It is perhaps redundant at the end of such a large Introduction to observe that

Garfinkel’s legacies are huge and ramifying across topics of inquiry and intellec-
tual disciplines. Yet it is just as striking to note that this influence has emerged,
not as the product of a wide-ranging social theory of the kind associated with
Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, or Anthony Giddens, but rather through
a comparatively narrow and somewhat technical set of topics. Among the key
elements of his social theory, we might single out the following.
First, Garfinkel made the decision at the outset of his career to focus on the so-
cial world as it appears to the social actor. While the social world can be rendered
in many different ways, it is only the world as it appears to the actor that is ac-
tionable and socially consequential. Although this profoundly Weberian stance
became increasingly common during the postwar years, only Garfinkel asked
how everyday objects and events in the actor’s world are grasped through the op-
erations of common-sense reasoning. Similarly, only Garfinkel fully grasped that
human culture is not an atlas or dictionary of common entries that are jointly
consulted, but instead insisted that the shared recognition of an intersubjectively
apprehended world required analyses that would focus on shared methods of
reasoning that are operationalized in situ.
Second, Garfinkel’s inspired use of Mannheim’s “documentary method of in-
terpretation,” as a process in which mutually elaborative relationships between
“underlying patterns” and their associated sets of appearances provided for the
profoundly contextual nature of human understandings of objects and events,
involved a bold and wholesale expansion of an essentially contextual-herme-
neutic process to every aspect of human reasoning. The import of this move was
to undermine the prevailing sociological view that rules, norms, or values could
provide a determinate basis for social organization, let alone for the scientific
predictability of social action. For all of them involve usage in context and, with
it, practical and overwhelmingly tacit interpretation. The import of this was ex-
traordinarily wide-ranging. Everything requires contextualization for its import
to be understood—from single words, sentences, conversations, and documents
such as prescriptions, instruction and repair manuals, and rulebooks, to norms,
laws, and values.
The move was repeated in Garfinkel’s equally expanded use of the term “index-
ical” and its corollary “reflexivity” to register the context-dependent nature of all
observation and understanding in the social world. And the notion was further
exploited in the idea of “Lebenswelt pairs,” comprising a “gapped” relationship be-
tween a set of instructions and the practical actions and know-how required to
implement them. (Ala Garfinkel (2002:Chapter 6), a simple exemplification of this
gap will be encountered by anyone who tries to build an item of furniture from the
instructions in an IKEA pack.) Very large bodies of ethnomethodological work in
the studies of deviance and policing, the operations of the law, sciences, workplace
studies, and human-computer interaction are founded on these basic ideas.
Third, while the contextual determination of intersubjective understanding
is a complex and multifaceted process, the sequential organization of action has
offered massive leverage, both in Garfinkel’s own endeavors and even more so in
CA. With this insight, the study of social action has been renewed and revivified. It
is now recognized that in the context of interaction, sequence is the fundamental
key both to the achievement of intersubjectivity and to the recognition by the
parties that it has been achieved (Heritage 1984:254–60; Maynard and Clayman
1991:399; Schegloff 1992). It would be no exaggeration to observe that the over-
whelming majority of CA research, now running to some 8,000+publications, is
built on the armature of sequence and sequential analysis. This orientation has
also begun to significantly influence psychology, linguistics, and, in particular, the
new subfield of interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2018).
Fourth, the functioning of these bodies of practices is underwritten by
what Garfinkel terms “trust”: the mutual and presupposed commitment of the
members of society to the fact that meaning can and will be managed through
the contextual operations that are perforce performed on talk and action. In
his dissertation, Garfinkel argued that this commitment to sense-making is the
fundamental characteristic of the social order, and one which is much deeper
in its implications than the more familiar conflict question promulgated by
Hobbes. Garfinkel also showed how profoundly moral this commitment is, that
it is threaded through the entire set of processes through which actions and
circumstances are rendered as accountable, and that it is this accountability that
persons use and rely upon in every moment of their waking lives.
These are grand themes of immense scope and power. They penetrate every
crevice of social life, and they drive empirical contributions that are corre-
spondingly diverse: ethnographies of normal and normative environments,
social problems, deviance, disability, science and technology, workplace
investigations, the methodologies involved in more standard research—
coding, survey research, statistical interpretations—and the ways that gender,
race, and other categories of identity attain their objectivity. We cannot predict
what further investigations may still emerge, reveal, or how. Just like the vir-
tual explosion of gender studies, basic ethnomethodological research in other
domains may set in motion or underwrite, in the social sciences, large-scale,
even explosive, developments that are not yet in view.
Such claims are possible because that there simply is no time out from the
common-sense reasoning and practices thereof that ethnomethodology brings
to light and shows to be fundamental to enacting social actions in every domain
of human life. Indeed, that professional social science might be more interested
in ethnomethodology than it has been is something that Garfinkel felt and con-
veyed in different ways. In Chapter 5 of this volume, for example, he suggests
that from the standpoint of the profession, the organization of ordinary activi-
ties—their ethnomethods and practices—are seen as trivial phenomena. When
compared to the enormous significance that we accord to the compelling issues
in contemporary society, whether they include inequality, oppression, economic
conditions, family structure, bureaucracies, disease, and the like, it would seem
that the organization of everyday activities is of miniscule importance.
However, Garfinkel wanted to reverse that attitude—to reclaim for the disci-
pline the magnitude of ethnomethodological studies—and he does so by pro-
posing what he called a “figure of speech,” a kind of metaphor, where “the missing
what” of detailed, embodied social accomplishment dwarfs the typical concerns
most central to sociology (Garfinkel’s emphasis):
With respect to the circumference of the earth, Mt. Everest has the prominence,
importance and relevance of a pockmark on a billiard ball. The missing what
that ethnomethodologists have been at the work of discovering is available to
lay and professional versions of organization as the earth stands to the presence
of Mt. Everest. Orderings of ordinary activities are unimaginably extensive phe-
nomena; they are essentially other than we do imagine or could ever imagine
them to be, and they await discovery. (Garfinkel, Chapter 5 in this volume, p. 155)
Garfinkel invites us to consider that society exists concretely, pervasively, and

globally in ways that both transcend and are fundamental to its manifestations
in the myriad spheres and institutions of social life. Forms of orderliness
across scientific, legal, quantitative, and other institutional arenas, as well as in
everyday life, are massive in terms of their presence for the produced structures
that inhabit these spheres. Moreover, they affect what our enterprises generate
as “data”—ordinary and institutional information and outcomes. The immense
presence of orderly, common-sense actions also means that there is an infinite
variety of practices—“more than we can ever imagine, more than we ever would
have imagined” (Garfinkel, Chapter 5 in this volume, p. 157)—whose presence
for our everyday, every night, ordinary, occupational, workaday, identity-re-
lated, playful, and other social worlds have yet to be fully investigated and un-
derstood. There is a huge amount of “unfinished business” that Garfinkel has
bequeathed to the social and linguistic sciences, just as there are many legacies
already in place.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Steve Clayman, Rod Watson, and Jack Whalen for their
comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
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PART I
ANT E C E DE N T S A N D T H E ORY
2
A Comparison of Decisions Made on Four
“Pre-Theoretical” Problems by Talcott
Parsons and Alfred Schütz
Harold Garfinkel
In the order in which they will be considered, the “pre-theoretical” problems

on which the decisions of Parsons and Schütz will be compared1 are named as
follows: (1) a theory of objects; (2) the logical status and uses of empirical ideal
types; (3) the observer as part of the field of observation; and (4) the logical status
and uses of the “subjective” categories.
I confine my interest in these problems to the fact that decisions about them
serve the theory maker as rules whereby, in the course of constructing a theory
of conduct, he assesses whether or not he has been scientifically correct in his
choice of concepts. It is not my task here to criticize these decisions. I intend only
to compare, with the problems being treated to the end of seeing how differences
in decisions eventuate in different conceptions by the two men of the problem of
social order.
(1) Theory of Objects
Describing another man’s “theory of objects” is the same as describing the other
man acting as an epistemologist. I conceive the epistemologist as the man who,
once having acknowledged the temporality of sensory evidences, has gone on
to ask how he is to account for the fact of reliable knowledge in the face of the
fact that the world is not always what it appears to be. Parsons and Schütz, as
epistemologists, frame the question differently. In the Kantian tradition, Parsons
asks: How can we believe our eyes? Schütz, in the Husserlian tradition, asks in-
stead: How do we believe our eyes? The difference in accent is a considerable one.
The Kantian question looks for the criteria of the validity of knowledge to primal,
invariant categories and thereby effects the notion of Being. The Husserlian
question proposes knowledge itself as the “yardstick for Being” by making of this
72 THE ETHNOMETHODOLOGY PROGRAM
notion, Being, merely a name that designates “an infinite series of operations to
be effectuated” by an experiencer.2
Whether he likes it or not, the investigator who seeks a theory of human con-
duct will have to make use of such terms as “real object” and “knowledge of the
objective world.” The sociologist not only is without a hiding place in the matter
but his task is compounded in its nastiness since as a routine part of his theo-
rizing he must attempt to make theories about other persons’ theories, a task that
involves him in almost every statement with the question of the meaning of the
claim to objective knowledge. The decision therefore is not one that he does in
fact pass off as the proper concern of philosophers even though he may claim to
be doing otherwise.
The nature of the decision that Parsons employs to allow him this claim, and
the one that is the most prevalent in the social sciences today is known as the
“correspondence theory”3 of reality. After describing it, I shall compare it with
Schütz’s decision which might be called the “congruence theory”4 of reality.
A person is said to entertain a correspondence theory of reality if it can be
shown that the person’s theorizing about the world employs the view that there
is a difference between the perceived object of the “outer world” and the concrete
object (exemplified in the metaphorical admonition that the cake of the universe
may be cut in diverse ways, or that the objects of the outer world are indubitably
out there but they may be variously invested with meaning). The concreteness
of the object in this view is a property of the object; such concreteness being in-
dependent of the various modes of attending of an experiencer. That an object
is a real object means in this view that the possibility of apprehending it is not
dependent upon the many possible ways in which it may be apprehended. It is in
this sense “actual.” This view marks off what it refers to as the fullness of the con-
crete object from the selective, schematic-like emphasis that it receives through
a conceptual representation. If the user of this theory places no limit upon the
perceiver’s conceptual inventiveness, the statement follows that one can never
exhaust the number of factual statements that can be made about the object.
The correspondence theory holds further that the function of any schema
of categories is to render some sort of approximation of what is actually out
there. The view is that through successive states of improvement, the logico-
empirical methods, based as they are on universal and unchanging primary
categories of apprehension, gives to the properly qualified observer a view of
the world of real objects that is independent of the historical conditions of the
observer’s circumstances as far as the accuracy of reproduction of actual things
is concerned.
An analytical model is then judged not only with reference to its utility within
the purposes of the observer, but also with reference to the extent to which it
renders an accurate reproduction of the reality that is out there. However, it
FOUR PRE-THEORETICAL DECISIONS 73
should be noted that this test of accuracy does not consist of a comparison of
what the observer says is out there with what is really out there as it is determined
by criteria independent of those employed by the observer (a position that would
make the tester akin to an interpreter of God’s secret intent) but rather, accuracy
is an automatic result of acting with proper regard for the canons of logico-em-
pirical inquiry.
That the objects that are reproduced correspond in their logical character to
the logical design of the real world is taken as a miracle of a sort, and like all
miracles is unproblematical with regard to how it is possible. Hence, the lack of
concern with the nonetheless legitimate question that arises within this view as
to whether the world could go contrary to the laws of logic and if so under what
conditions? The answer, at the limits of the conversation, goes to the effect that
it could but so far it has not, the “reason” being that the basic rules, based as they
are on the primary categories, are not subject for their validity to the fluctuations
of circumstance. A statement that is true for one place and time is universally
true if it is to begin with the product of the proper procedures.
The correspondence theory makes a separation between the real world and
the subjective interpretation of the real world. The separation is such that there
are on the one hand the concrete objects in all their fullness and on the other
hand the conceptual representations of these objects. Such representations in
abstracting as they do certain features from the concrete object present the sci-
entist with a faded reproduction. The objects that an actor treats, whether he be
layman or scientist, are those concrete objects though he treats them in terms of
their features that are of interest to him. The things about them that interest him
and their reality as objects have nothing to do with each other, nor does the fact
that he has an interest in them necessarily guarantee the objective character of
the objects.
The leading premise of the “congruence” theory of reality is that the perceived
object of the “outer world” is the concrete object, and that the two terms, “per-
ceived object” and “concrete object,” are synonymous and interchangeable terms.
Rather than there being a world of concrete objects which a theory cuts this
way and that, the view holds that the cake is constituted in the very act of cut-
ting. No cutting, no cake, there being no reality out there that is approximated
since the world in this view is just as it appears. To use a phrase common to the
conversations of phenomenologists, “There is nothing behind it.” In this view,
the way in which something is of interest to a witness is all of the way in which
that thing is real. Rather than the actuality of the object being defined by the fact
of sensory evidences, actuality means only “not supposedly.” Nor, in this view,
does concreteness depend upon the variety of sensory presentations. The view
holds by contrast with the correspondence theory that sensory evidences are the
conditions but not the contents of perceptions, while only insofar as there is a
standard found in a non-perceptual order that remains invariant under the var-
ious sensory aspects is concreteness possible. The concreteness of the object in
this view is found in the object constituted as a unity of meanings and only as a
unity of meanings. Only insofar as sensory signals are experienced as signifying
something other than themselves do they function as specifications of an object.
An actual object is any unified set of experiences regardless of whether they be
ideally or sensorily founded. The fullness of the concrete object is not marked
off in this view from the schematic emphasis of a conceptual representation of
the object. Rather the object is conceived as never appearing except through
its schema. The schema of specifications is precisely the object itself. Hence, the
statement under the correspondence theory that a conceptual scheme can never
exhaust the number of factual statements that can be made about the concrete
object reads according to the congruence theory that only in God’s eye are all
possible specifications of an object simultaneously relevant, and that where this
is the case the all-seeing God for knowing all knows nothing.
Compared again to the view that a function of any conceptual scheme is to
render some sort of approximation of what is really out there, the congruence
theory holds that however the experiencer experiences something out there, is
out there in the way he experiences it. For example, the doubt that he experiences
about what he heard is along with the other specifications of what he heard a
specification of what he heard as something doubted. As an object, the thing
heard stands before him complete with its doubted character.
Whereas in the correspondence theory one may ask the question of what is
the objective world and what is objective knowledge, one can only ask under the
premises of the congruence theory, what are the varieties of objective worlds and
what are the varieties of objective knowledge. Here the talk is of a pluralism of
worlds; of “multiple realities.” Within this view there are many objective worlds;
as many objective worlds as there are variations in the attitudes that constitute
them. In fact, in this view, the only worlds are objective worlds. The alternative
to a world that is not objective, is a world that is meaningless, that is, experi-
enced as the “mere actuality of sensory stimuli.”5 In the congruence theory the
term “subjective” means the inability of an experiencer to actualize an object, i.e.,
to intend a meaning. A world experienced subjectively is experienced without
sense; it is experienced as William James’s “bloomin’, buzzing confusion.” In a
word then, the congruence theory puts both actor and observer into a setting as
the organizers of that setting and keeps them there.
But the ways in which these objects are constituted, the rules that govern the
tests that the experiencer uses of whether he has seen correctly, the tests that
he considers legitimate ones for the accuracy of his judgments, the conditions
under which he can experience a discrepancy between expectations and events,
the consequences of such surprises, the socially legitimate methods for resolving
such discrepancies, the rules that govern his judgmental behavior, the devices by
which he establishes and maintains the relevance of events for each other—all
these show different characteristics as one compares worlds and the modes of
attending them that are particular to each of these worlds. Hence they show not
only between themselves but between them and the world of the sociological
attitude different effects for the constitution of objects and objective knowledge.
The “congruence” view holds that it is a consequence of acting according to the
rules of logico-empirical method that statements cannot be tested by consulting
the meanings of empirical constructs but must be tested by subjecting them to
a course of experience with a Nature that the user conceives of as blind to the
meanings of his statements. A theory constructed within such a view is regarded
as organizing the possibilities of the observer’s experience to present him with
one out of a boundless class of possible objective worlds. Hence determinism
is not an ontological characteristic of a set of actual events but is a property of
the theory that presents a set of events as relevant to each other. In the corre-
spondence theory an empirical law is a reflection of nature’s uniformities. In
the congruence theory an empirical law is a statement of the uniformities of the
observer’s experiences. In the correspondence theory, a theory is conceived of as
asymptotic to the correspondence theory’s concrete world. As Norbert Wiener
puts it, the best model of a cat is the cat itself. To say of such a theory that it
is a first order approximation means that it is a preliminary fitting to a system
of actual events. In the congruence theory, to say that a theory is a first order
approximation means that a set of events has been fitted to an initial formula-
tion of their relatedness. The correspondence view conceives the “fitting” to be a
matching operation between a theoretical and an actual system. The congruence
view conceives the “fitting” to be a constitutive operation in which the objective
character of events and the significations that lend to experiences their character
as actual events is given to an observer through the operations of his theory.
According to the congruence theory, a theory serves the function of orga-
nizing the possibilities of experience to present the experiencer with one out of
many possible objective worlds. Where the action is guided by rules of logico-
empirical method, the objective world is peculiar in that it stands only as long as
the experiences that it hypothesizes can be repeatedly confirmed by any person
regardless of social affiliation who does what the statements say he should do.
Such a world is certainly at variance with the world of objectivities of everyday
life. According to the congruence view, the business of “sciencing” a problem
is not seen as it is in the correspondence view as a procedure by which reality
is successively approximated. Rather, it is seen as a procedure of successively
transforming, or better successively reconstituting a world, any world, in accord-
ance with the particular rules of the scientific attitude and the procedure of the
scientific method.
(2) The Logical Status and Uses of Empirical Ideal Types
To understand Parsons’s decision with regard to the logical status and uses of
empirical ideal types it is helpful to recall that within the correspondence theory
a difference is predicated between the perception of the object and the concrete
object. The provision for the separation between subject and object (with the
relationship between them being represented by the subject’s object oriented
actions) provides a single function that empirical constructs can serve in the
“economy” of activity. For the actor, such empirical constructions serve only a
mapping function and in this sense the actor’s empirical categorizations are rele-
vant to the actor’s purposes as well as his scientifically assessed probable success
in accomplishing these purposes. Affective and valuative colorings reflect non-
empirical aspects of these constructs. The use of rationality as a methodological
principle in evaluating the reality oriented notions of the actor is clearly implied.
The congruence theory by contrast provides for the empirical character of the
construct only by the test that the actor attaches specifications of a standard time
and place to the possibilities of experience that the construct orders. That the
construct may embody affective coloring is taken as a possible characteristic par-
ticularly for the constructs of the attitudes of daily life where hopes and fears
are inextricable parts of the colorings of the actor’s situation. Hence the witches
that materialize in graveyards every midnight on every October 30 are empirical
constructs of precisely the same logical order as the construction “my desk that
will be in the corner of my office when I go there later this afternoon.” There may
be a difference in the way in which the frame of restricted possibilities that each
proposes is tested but this difference in procedures does not impugn the empir-
ical character of the construction itself. The congruence theory thereby makes
investigatively problematical what the correspondence theory settles by assump-
tion; namely, the properties of rationality in the social world. Further, evaluating
the reality oriented notions of the actor requires, if one adheres to the rules of
the congruence theory, that one assess these actions relative to the peculiarities
of the structure of relevances as they make up the meaningful structure of a so-
cial world.
Notice has already been taken that a separation is intended and maintained
in the correspondence theory between the empirical construction and the ob-
ject it designates. In its abstracting function, the empirical construct stands to
the object as that abstracted set of specifications of the concrete object relevant
to the actor’s interests. The empirical construct in this important sense of its log-
ical status is not constitutive of the object. Rather, the correspondence theory
holds that the empirical construct tells only what there is about the concrete ob-
ject as it stands independently of the construction that is of interest. Insofar as
the attendant theory is worked out in formal fashion those constructs provide a
systematic descriptive vocabulary in the form of a set of dimensions all of which

must be accounted for to effect what is then referred to as a determinate de-
scription. The object of treatment, the intended object, is then referred to as
an aspect of the concrete object, or as an abstraction from the concrete object.
For example, the table that I write on may be initially represented in appro-
priate though “faded” fashion according to the dimensions of length, breadth,
and width. This gets me an empirical table, specified by a set of three numbers,
though this view holds that such a construction is not the table on which I am
writing for this table has its litter, its colors, scratches, drawers, the fact that
I have a right to dispose of it for a price, and so on. Should it then be my pur-
pose to construct a scheme to handle only physical spatial arrangements, the
first three dimensions will do well enough. Should I need a scheme to handle
human conduct, I might need to include these further “aspects.” I might then go
on adding dimensions until the abstracted portrait becomes a closer and closer
approximation to the concrete table here before me. Ultimately, though subject
to the fact that language according to this view in some measure lies about what
is actually out there, and because as this view holds it, language is by nature
schematizing in the effect of directing the attention of the actor to the objects of
his situation, the abstraction would stand as meaning everything that is experi-
enceable about the concrete object.
An important property that the construct has then for the scientific observer
is its function of mere nominalistic designation. And indeed, in whatever ways
language may be considered to be of problematical interest, in one respect it is
not problematical: it is not in scientific usage conceived to be in any way consti-
tutive of the object. It is problematical only in the various ways it may prepare an
actual object for the actor’s treatment.
Thus conceived, it is possible to set up a class of abstract representations which
have the property in intended usage of standing as merely arbitrary standards
of comparison with the actual events. Such a construction depicts a merely em-
pirically possible object, possible in the sense of being actually conceivable and
logically consistent. As such a standard it stands outside of the fluctuations of
circumstance and perspectival appearances. The fall of events serve neither to
confirm nor deny it. At best it stands as a guide for the researcher in ordering
observables to each other. Such is the logical character and uses of the empirical
ideal type as Weber proposed it and as Parsons conceives it.
For Schütz the perceived object is the same as the concrete object. No differ-
ence is made between them. The empirical construction stands to the object that
it designates as constitutive of the unified character of those specifications which
in their unity as a schema of specifications mean all of what is meant by the term
“concrete object.” Schütz does not make a difference between the intended object
and the concrete object. The two terms mean the same thing, for the object is not
something actual to which the actor attaches meanings. It is actual through the
meanings that together are constitutive of the object. The object is a meaningful
one in the moment of recognition, that is, in the moment of the actor’s treatment
of a set of specifications as related to each other. Hence, subject and object are si-
multaneously constituted as a unified field. The actor is not conceived by Schütz
to be related to the object by his actions. Rather, the system of specifications as an
object and the system of objects stand in relationships to each other. The actor’s
actions become for the observer a set of operators whereby these relationships
are maintained and altered.
There is another point of contrast. In Parsons’s usage, the empirical construct
stands to the object as a set of specifications abstracted from the concrete object
in accordance with the actor’s interests. Schütz’s usage provides that the object
is itself constituted according to the actor’s interests, with nothing left over. The
object in fact is real in precisely the sense of the way it stands as a schema of in-
terest relevant specifications. There is therefore a problem involved for Schütz in
describing the object that is not a problem for Parsons. This problem is that of
describing the structural organization of the object, i.e., its organizational prop-
erties as a unity of meanings. This concern is the heart of Schütz’s insistence on
the importance and the lack of sufficient work on the problem of relevance while
for Parsons this problem has been decided through the pattern variable scheme.
A classification of objects for Schütz would have to wait upon a phenomenolog-
ical description of the formal properties of these relevance structures. And before
even this can be successfully undertaken, much more needs to be known than
is currently available about the ways in which “consistency” both appears and
is achieved within the various modes of attending to various worlds. Parsons’s
classification of objects short circuits this area of problems by starting with the
very kind of classification that Schütz would arrive at as an end product of his
researches.
The empirical construct for Schütz does not have the sense of a faded repro-
duction of the actual object. Rather, any schema of specifications is constitutive
of an object that is distinct from others and is experientially irreducible. Schütz
would ask the question of the conditions of the actor’s make-up under which the
object shows, as an organized set of specifications, the property of a closed set
or an open set or a set that permits the relevance of all possible specifications.
There is for Schütz as there is not for Parsons the relevance of time as a phase
so to speak of each specification’s meaning so that the structure of the object
is depicted as a reticulated set of temporally qualified specifications within the
stream of experience. For Schütz the object experienced as a unity of meaning is
a unity, a web of temporalized specifications. The thing perceived would be for
Schütz not a schema of perceptual events but a schema of temporally related per-
ceptual events (or better, temporally qualified events).
Any such set of specifications may be the constitutive specifications of the ob-
ject, but there is no sense here of the construct as an abstract portrait that stands
in approximation to the concrete object. Hence it is only with reference to the time
schemas of the actor’s actions that the object is real and concrete. Hence at any par-
ticular moment in standard time for Schütz the concrete object is never more
than what the actor knows or expects of it through the treatment that the actor
gives or gets, has given or expects to give or get from it. Rather than depending
then on its ontological characteristics to provide for the fact that the actor may
learn something new, Schütz would point to the nature of the construction and
the rules governing the test of the actor’s preconceptions as well as the procedures
for administering and evaluating the tests of the actor’s own preconceptions to
allow for the possibility that he might learn something new.
It is in this respect that language is problematical for Schütz. Rather than lan-
guage being epiphenomenal with reference to the experienceable possibilities,
and rather than language being problematical only in the various ways it may
prepare an actual object for the actor’s treatment, it is inseparable from the phe-
nomenon of a unity of specifications. It does not consist in the initial instance
in a grammar and a set of signs, but rather consists of the logics and the objec-
tive designata—the things meant by the signs and the objects that expressions
express, that meanings mean or point to as standards found in a non-percep-
tual order whereby an interpersonally constituted world of objects is achieved.
That language may show the above nominalistic properties is not a philosophical
point of beginning for Schütz as it is for Parsons, but needs accounting for in
terms of the conditions of experience under which the relationship of the sign
to the thing it refers to shows such an amazing characteristic, amazing because it
is precisely a feature of the familiar language of daily life that one cannot play in
such fast and loose manner with language.
Finally, the empirical ideal type as the arbitrarily constructed standard of com-
parison with actual events—the merely empirically possible object which the fall
of events can neither confirm nor deny—the mere guide for the researcher in
ordering the actual observations, is for Schütz nothing else than the constructed
object that an actor, any actor orients as an object, but viewed by the observer as
a constructed object rather than as it appears to the natural attitude as the thing
actually out there.
(3) The Observer as Part of the Field of Observation
This problem involves a decision whereby the attitude is designated within the
rules of which the observer invokes a guarantee as to the reproducible character
of the observed data.
Much talk has recently been going the rounds of social scientists about phe-
nomenology. In a prevailing accent of this conversation something referred to
as phenomenology, depicted as a new philosophy of social scientific method, is
proposed as a touchstone by which one may get away from theoretical super-
fluities to the world of actual appearance. What is not seen, by and large, is that
the term “phenomenology” refers only to the rules that will be found operating
in any perspective—scientific, religious, aesthetic, practical, etc.—whereby cer-
tain areas of experience are made non-relevant to the problem in hand, while
with reference to others a “position is taken.” They are accorded the accent of
affirmation, of just so. Every philosophy, every theory, every attitude toward the
world has its relevant phenomenology, or better, its relevant phenomenological
attitude and method if one uses the term phenomenology as MacLeod suggests.
Every perspective includes its rules on which the irreducible character of data-
experiences is based. Every perspective provides the rules whereby the differ-
ence is made between that which appears in its theoretic sense and that which
appears in its sense of a datum, whether it be the theoretic or data sense of the
“outer world” or the world of “inner experience.” This holds for the businessman
as well as the infant; the scientist as well as the theologian. One may see this if the
terms “scientist” and “practical man” are used to designate ways of attending to
the world rather than as designations of actual persons.
There are many phenomenologies to choose from. Or better, there are
many phenomenological attitudes to choose from. There are also two leading
contenders: (1) the so-called “neo-Kantian” phenomenology which is preva-
lent in social science today, and with this or that shading is found in the work of
Cassirer, Lewin, Freud, Mead, Weber. We are interested in the fact that it is also
found in the work of Parsons. (2) The Husserlian phenomenology is represented
in the work of Schütz.
The question that the choice between them decides may be asked as follows: If
one allows the possibility that the world has a perspectival appearance to the
actor—and both Parsons and Schütz are insistent on this—then in achieving
a description of the world “from the point of view of the actor” how can the
describer guarantee the anonymity of his description, i.e., how can he guarantee
that his description will vary independently with the occasions of his own
social life.
For both Parsons and Schütz the situation of action is constituted simultane-
ously with the defining specifications of the actor. Both stress the importance
of perspectival appearance. In achieving a description of the actor’s world,
Parsons’s phenomenology requires that the observer suspend judgment on eve-
rything but the possibility of a community between the actor and the observer.
This possibility stands without question under the assumption of the invariant
primal categories of understanding. Thus, the truth is in all of us if we act in
accordance with logico-empirical procedures, these procedures being the guar-

antees of anonymity of results. Put otherwise, adherence to these canons ensures
that the factual portraits will not reflect the occasions of the observer’s social
life. The result that interests us is an actor who orients a situation that shows
this or that degree of prejudice with the well-trained observer who follows the
canons of logico-empirical method sitting as arbiter of all disputes as to what
the world consists of in fact. Thus, the observer is the final arbiter over the ques-
tion of whether or not and with what degree of coloration of ignorance, error,
or myth the actor has authentic knowledge about the world. Methodologically,
the consequence of this theory of the actor’s situation is that the observer brings
to the actor’s assessment of the world a measuring stick drawn from outside the
structure of the actor’s experiences in his situation of action to decide between
what it is that for an actor is actually theory, belief, hypothesis, fantasy, fact, sen-
timent, and so on. The measure is found in the notion of the rational man as he
is given in the ideal scientist who has access to the full body of procedure and
fact of his discipline, and as he is given practically in the particular instance of
the trained observer. In this view, this rational man—and here is the point of
large importance—does not stand as an arbitrary standard of comparison, but
is treated as a methodologically necessary principle of the actor’s action if he is
to have factual knowledge of his situation. If the observer as an instance of this
rational man deviates from the ideal, the amount of his deviation is a measure of
the community of myth that he shares with the subject he observes. But subject
and observer, in this view, can in principle together enjoy a communality of a ra-
tionally appraised world, automatically guaranteed as to its factual character by
the supposition that the ideal rational man is unaltered and unalterable. He is in
the world but unbound by time.
Like Parsons, Schütz proposes an order that is simultaneously constituted
with the defining parameters of the actor, but unlike Parsons’s phenomenolog-
ical attitude, the Schützian attitude begins its descriptive task after suspending
everything that Parsons neutralizes including the possibility of a community be-
tween the actor and the observer. In suspending judgment on the solution of
the primal categories, and with it the view that the method of understanding is
methodologically unproblematical, the Schützian attitude involves the suspen-
sion of judgment too on the other solutions that have been proposed, as for ex-
ample, the solution that proposes that the objects of the world are given directly
through the senses, and hence if one assumes common biological make-up, one
can assume a community between observer and actor; or the solution that the
senses give mere appearance while only mind-stuff is real, so that if one assumes
that men think alike, one can assume a common definition of the situation; or
the solution that it is objective Spirit that binds men together in a community of
knowledge.
The problem that Schütz addresses instead is simple but potent: granted a
world that actor and observer may know together, with whatever colorings of
doubt, hesitancy, certainty, typicality, uniqueness, publicity, privacy, orderliness,
confusion, determinateness or indeterminateness, repetition or singularity, and
with whatever accents of immanence or transcendence to thought—granted
all this. What are the conditions by way of the properties of the structuring of
experiences and only of the structuring of experience under which an experi-
encer experiences an order that shows these faces? Granted that there is know-
ledge that shows the peculiar and in many ways the historically recent property
of being invariant with reference to the social status of the knower—knowledge
that is simultaneously “anonymous and communal” (to borrow a phrase from
Thomas Mann)—what is there property-wise in the structures of the attitudes
that are constitutive of such an order of experience under which the experienced
world shows such intriguing features? For Schütz such a question cannot as a
matter of rule be answered by invoking philosophical doctrine. It requires in the
very way in which it is posed that one seek an answer by addressing the nature of
experience itself.
To adopt such a view cuts one off from the use of the rational man as a de-
vice for assessing the factual, hypothetical, theoretical, mythical, or whatever
character of the knowledge that the experiencer has about the world. Rather,
the make-up of the rational man even as a mere construction—and it seems that
if one follows Schütz this is the best one can ever hope for as far as the use of
the rational man in the investigator’s tasks is concerned—must be drawn from
the investigations of how men, isolated and yet simultaneously in an odd com-
munion, go about the business of constructing, testing, maintaining, altering,
validating, questioning, defining an order together.
An important consequence of using Parsons’s phenomenological attitude as
compared with Schütz’s can be shown by comparing the status of factual know-
ledge and ignorance under the two attitudes.
If we examine the actor’s definition of the situation as it is known under the
neo-Kantian phenomenological attitude, the observer finds the actor’s informa-
tion as something in the world only after he has discounted the actor’s situation of
action in light of the observer’s wider knowledge and wiser procedures of infor-
mation gathering and interpretation. If one actor sends a message to another, the
amount of factual information that the receiver gets from the message is limited,
by the observer as a matter of methodological principle, by the extent to which
the receiver operates upon the message according to the canons of rationality.
Everything he receives and makes sense of outside of this is in such an observer’s
view error or myth. Thus despite the protestations of the actor that the Jews really
have control of the country as is evidenced in the newspaper reports of the current
tax scandals he is met by the observer with a quiet, “Tush, I know better.”
If matters did not go beyond the fact that the one maintained that the Jews
were taking over while the other wagged his finger at him, there would be no case
for comparison of any theoretical or practical importance. But the case is other-
wise. The observer not only wags his finger, but he maintains as well that unless
the actor changes his ways, that is, unless the actor revises his portrait to accord
with the factual state of affairs as it is presented by the observer, the actor stands
a good chance of failing to realize his projects. In fact, it is only by a random con-
catenation of events that he could under such circumstances realize his project,
and if he does, he will have been right but will adduce the wrong reasons. In the
final analysis, he will not have accumulated a body of empirically useful infor-
mation and will not know how to bring about the effect that for one reason or
another he seeks. In effect, discrepancies from the logico-empirical procedures
reduce the instrumental efficacy of his knowledge. Or, following Hobbes, you
can’t be rational and lose.
An important consequence of this view for structural-functional theory is that
in finding a place for the functions of ignorance in a social arrangement, a theorist
so oriented would provide the following: Not only what a man knows but what he
does not know has to be accounted for in rendering logically complete description
of the factors that condition the occurrence of a set of events of conduct. In short,
logical completeness requires that ignorance be accorded motivational status.
By contrast there is Schütz’s insistence that the actor as well as the observer
are always left with the actual light that they have; they never have more nor less
and that they act always and only on the basis of what they know. The impor-
tant thing, for Schütz, and the thing that stands for him without a standard with
which to judge ironically is that the actor keeps going. But how? Parsons would
find the answer in a community of myth or the various structural arrangements
and operations, e.g., the allocating of authority and responsibility whereby the
members knowingly or not protect each other from the actual consequences of
their errors. Schütz would seek the answer in the properties of the constructs of
everyday life, the nature of the structure of relevances, the logics of everyday life,
the interpersonally entertained and validated canons for achieving a definition
of a situation and an assessment of outcomes whereby a situation is experienced
by the actor as determinate in its meanings and certain as far as needed informa-
tion is concerned even though a strict rational assessment of the situation would
make a determinate solution impossible. Thus, for Schütz, the huge problemat-
ical thing is the nature of the actor’s factual knowledge. For him the nature of the
actor’s factual knowledge and ignorance as well as the fact that it shows in some
matter of degree instrumental adequacy must somehow be accounted for within
the character of the actor’s experiences and only here, and with reference to the
relationship between the structural characteristics of his factual knowledge and
the continuity of his activity.
For Schütz, unlike Parsons, the notion of the rationality of the action
designates nothing else than the properties of the actor’s model, the opera-
tions of judgment, choice, assessment of outcomes, and so on that he does in
fact employ. Should the actor deliberate, or should he erect a plan of decisions
whereby he sets up prior to the occurrence the alternative he will choose should
he be faced with them, then the term rationality may be used to designate just
this: that he acts deliberately and with a preconceived strategy. The effect of
such a view is to reduce the term “rationality” to the status of a mere sign for
the actions or cluster of actions that the observer must now seek to correlate
empirically with the various orders of consequences of these actions that the
observer may be interested in.
(4) The Logical Status of the Subjective Categories
Holding the correspondence theory in mind, particularly as it provides for the

separation of subject and object, it is possible to see a little more clearly what
is the logical status as well as the uses of the subjective categories as Parsons
conceives them. The separation of subject and object requires Parsons to insert
“between” them the notion of a relationship. The subject stands related to the
object system through his action orientations. An actor is said to relate himself
to an object; to seek to establish, maintain, alter and so on his relationships to
objects. These relationships, or better, systems of relationships consist of the ten-
dencies of patterned treatments that the subject affords the object system.
Given the subject as a socio-biological organism and a situation of objects that
this organism through the intricate processes of socialization comes to attach
various orders of meaning to, Parsons finds that he need not invoke the subjec-
tive categories until his actor has developed sufficient autonomous control as a
system to make it necessary for the observer’s predictive successes that the actor’s
definition of the situation be considered as an important intervening variable.
Insofar as there is a problem involved in handling the subjective categories under
the assumption of the community of the actor and the observer the problem
does not go beyond the troubles visited upon the wit of the observer in devising
convincing techniques for reproducing the meaningful world of the actor. The
rationale of this troublesomeness depicts the technique as a means of probing
beneath the skull to find out what it is that is hidden there—or getting it out of
the person in the face of the fact that he may not want to tell. Meanings, it will be
remembered, are attached to actual objects. Hence if there is reason to believe
that the person under study has not achieved a symbolized world (for this is the
sense of attached meanings) the investigator may spare himself the trouble of
dealing with the actor’s definition of the situation.
By comparison with Parsons, Schütz does not treat the subjective categories as
intervening variables. Rather, the sociologist’s enterprise involves him according
to one postulate of his method at every moment of his theorizing with the use of
subjective categories. Schütz, in fact, deplores the use of the term “subjective cat-
egories” as misleading since it is frequently used to make a difference somehow
between the world portrayed according to objective categories and the world
portrayed according to subjective categories as if the “two worlds” were different
from each other.
With due regard for the fact that the observer’s model of the actor, according
to Schütz, includes the actor’s model of the world as the observer constructs the
actor’s model, one can say that the observer’s model of the actor is all of what is
meant by Schütz by the subjective categories. There is no problem of finding out
what is really going on under the other man’s skull. Even the finest devices that
would translate brain waves into the content of the stream of experience would
not do away with the necessity of this postulate of “subjective” interpretation.
The only data that the observer has access to is behavioral data, the signs that
the other person generates, while the schema of the actor that the observer
uses serves as nothing else than a set of rules whereby behavioral categories are
transformed into the categories of action.
The subjective categories for Schütz therefore refer to the fact that the observer
constructs an analytical dummy called an actor with typified ways of experien-
cing a typified order of objects, and that he interprets the bodily movements
and sounds of the empirical other person according to the rules provided in the
constructed actor in his constructed situation.
The Consequences of These Decisions for the

Problem of Order
With this much comparison, the way is open to show how these decisions even-
tuate in different conceptions of the problem of order.6 The problem of order is
conceived to consist of the observer’s tasks of specifying the factors that are con-
ditional of permanence and change. Parsons and Schütz are alike in their con-
cern for achieving something more than a vocabulary that permits a set of static
state descriptions. Each seeks to handle the problem of permanence and change
by invoking a set of terms that permit statements describing the “path” of the
alterations of a state. But the different decisions lend different phrasings to the
question and thus the visions of the correct solution differ.
It is possible, of course, to construct many theories within any set of decisions.
In discussing consequences for a theory of order one cannot therefore point
directly to the theoretical constructions that are implied by the decisions. One
can however ask for the kinds of questions that these decisions raise as one goes
about constructing a theory and thereby understand the consequences in the
sense that the decisions about the theory of order are confined by the framework
of rules of proper procedure laid down in the way the problems discussed above
were settled. This is the procedure we shall use.
We consider Parsons first, holding in mind that he seeks, as does Schütz, a
theory that provides more than a set of momentary state descriptions. What
problems does he have to settle and what solution does he choose for settling
them? This is the question.
The correspondence theory with its separation of subject and object and its
provision for a guaranteed communal world between actors poses the problem
of whether situational and actor changes are to be conceived of as varying inde-
pendently of each other. The actor invests his situation of objects with meaning
and is allowed to treat the situation of objects in terms of their attached meanings,
so the problem is made nasty because one must necessarily distinguish between
a representation of the situation as it appears from “within” and the situation as it
appears from “without.” Given this distinction as it is drawn up under Parsons’s
decisions one has to decide then how to handle a system of actors in a situation
of action depicted from the standpoint of the observer and without reducing the
actor’s view to the status of a mere epiphenomenon on the one hand, or, on the
other hand, allowing the actor’s view and thereby allowing the individual as a
source of change in the system with the risk of indeterminism or risk the gain of
a determinism at the cost of turning the system into a table of organization that
operates as a set of impersonal forces that shove the individuals around here and
there, while taking it as a matter of factual interest that he is correctly aware or
not of what is happening to him.
Here the assumption of communality, the nature of the concrete and actual
object, and the decision to allow the observer a guaranteed factually anonymous
picture if he acts rationally permits a solution at one point at least. The situation
from within and the situation from without are the same when the actor is ra-
tionally oriented to the logico-empirical realities of his situation. But there is a
troublesome residue. There remains the case where the actor’s system of empir-
ical constructions may be factually at fault though despite this the actor seems
nevertheless to thrive and even shows considerable reluctance to follow attempts
made to enlighten him even when it appears that his rational self-interest is not
served by his remaining “in error.” This question that arises directly from the na-
ture of the decisions requires solution. We shall see in a moment how it is solved.
Let’s first consider some further problems faced by the theorist.
Provision is made in Parsons’s theory of action for the inherent purposiveness
of action. It involves by definition an orientation to a future state of affairs by an
actor driven by the quest for satisfactions, his drives showing again by definition
some degree of normative control. This raises the question of how to handle the
social structuring of need dispositions, action orientations, and situations of
objects, for the looming fact is that of social routinization—the “ruttedness” of
the activities of men in social groupings. Or to put it flatly, the phenomena of
orderliness.
Finally—though finally only in the sense that this is the last point we shall be
concerned with—the decision to require two Egos orienting an order in which
each finds the other and that stands with some “necessary minimum” of con-
sensus with regard to standards of preference, traditions, empirical mappings,
time perspectives, ultimate and short term interests and so on permits the notion
of state of the patterned interactions that define a system at a moment of clock
time, though this moment is a fat moment, that is, an interval treated as a point.
A succession of such fat moments produces the notion of temporal sequence. But
for playing in such fast and loose fashion with the relevance of time in the defini-
tion of action the fat moment squeezes out the temporal meaning of duration, so
that one must look elsewhere than to the analysis of time to answer the question
that remains: where to look for the factors that are conditional of the regularities
of temporal succession?
The problems so presented and taken together permit of more than one joint
solution. One could, for example, concretize the system, give it a set of purposes
of its own, subordinate the actor to the teleology of the system and the pro-
ject would be launched. It is not enough to say that this solution is little better
than a political doctrine, for there is much work going on today particularly in
the area of “organizational behavior” that works with exactly this kind of ra-
tionale for the questions that are asked by the users. It is not difficult to under-
stand since common sense finds nothing out of the ordinary in the notion of an
organization’s goals or purposes.
For Parsons the solution is sought in the metaphor of systemic equilibrium
in the face of environmental alterations, where the notion of system and envi-
ronment or setting are terms that are always relative to each other in a “little sys-
tems have littler systems to bite ’em” kind of way. That system beyond which are
the settings of the barren time and physical conditions is the society. The system
of action is conceived to be systematically related to a structurally relevant set-
ting in the sense that certain of its operations known as boundary operations
serve to maintain those characteristics of the activity that remain relatively in-
variant with reference to structurally relevant alterations in the setting. That is
to say, these operations maintain the distinctiveness of the system relative to its
setting. The system is conceived to be dissolvable in the sense that the character-
istics of the activities can become indistinguishable from the structured envi-
ronment. Not only are the activities such as to show this boundary maintaining
property but they show as well the property in the conditions of their occurrence
of maintaining their characteristics as operations. This is known as the property

of a system of self-maintenance or continuity. The solution is an ingenious one
and should put at rest any criticisms aimed at Parsons in his past formulations
of the conditions of survival of a system, for the language of the structural-func-
tional metaphor makes it clear that it is not anything apart from the set of actors
and the order of objects they orient. The concern instead is always for conditions
and consequences.
By comparison with Parsons, Schütz’s decisions make it necessary to develop
a vocabulary that provides for the meaningful structure of the social world with
actor, action and situation of objects being conceived of as the terms for handling
the phenomenon of continuity of activity and only continuity. Because Schütz
has built directly into these initial conceptions the notion of time as a constitu-
tive structure of action, the result is the view of a meaningful world that is con-
stituted, maintained, and altered through action of actors and only through the
action of actors. The system is found in the phenomenon of continuous interper-
sonal action which is possible as long as the conditions of a meaningful world
are given. Hence order has no sense to it of orderliness but points only to the
characteristics of continuous activity whatever these characteristics may be. For
Schütz there is no necessity for bringing in another set of conceptions to handle
the problem of alterations of state since the initial specifications of the actor, ac-
tion, and order of objects have already incorporated the meaning of alterations
of state.
These two theorists can be compared with regard to two sets of problems, each
with its own particular order of facts. We shall refer to these two problems each
with its own order of facts as “levels.” The first will be known as the level of
de facto action; the second, as the level of the premises of conduct.
The level of de facto action is reached by the procedure of excluding three
sets of considerations from problematical view. These considerations are (1) the
characteristics of the units that make up the system—that is to say, a set of in-
variant characteristics definitive of the units are assumed; (2) the assumption is
made that the method of understanding works between the actors in the system;
and (3) that a flow of activity takes place. At this level the observer’s attention is
paid to the regularities of activity. He attempts to explain change by a theory that
deals only with those conditions of the system other than those which we have
indicated in these three problem areas.
The level of the premises of conduct is defined by bringing these three sets of
considerations into central problematical view.
The problem of social order appears differently at each level; and for Parsons
and Schütz, the problem of order appears differently again within these levels.
The problem of order as Parsons sees it at the de facto level consists of the
observer’s task of stating the structural conditions of a system of activity under
which normatively oriented patterns of activity continue to maintain the system

of activity as a system.
The problem of order as we would expect Schütz to see it at the de facto level
consists of the task of specifying the structural conditions of a system of activity
under which the normatively oriented patterns of activity continue to maintain
these structural conditions.
At the level of the premises of conduct, the problem of order as Parsons sees it
is the problem of the conditions of the actor’s make-up under which his actions
as part of a system of normative activity maintain the system of activity.
At the level of the premises of conduct, the problem of order as Schütz would
see it is the problem of the conditions of the actor’s make-up under which his
actions as part of a system of normative activity maintain the conditions of the
actor’s make-up.
If there is such a thing in American sociology today as a leading theoretical
emphasis, it is found in the theorizing predicated on the solutions to the ana-
lytic problems that are similar to the ones that Parsons has made. Despite the
ingeniousness of much of the theorizing, the nature of meaningful action and the
status of verstehende sociology remains obscure. Schütz’s decisions by a fresh at-
tack on the problem of the relevance of time in the definition of action structures
is in my opinion a promising and clarifying alternative approach.
* Editor’s note: This document is excerpted from Chapter 5 of Harold Garfinkel’s

dissertation, The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order. Harvard
University: Department of Social Relations (1952). It is a condensation of some
of the themes of Chapter 5, prepared by Harold Garfinkel for a seminar in 1960.
Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives and the Harold Garfinkel Archives.
3
Harold Garfinkel’s Focus on Racism,
Inequality, and Social Justice
The Early Years, 1939–1952
Anne Warfield Rawls
Harold Garfinkel, a Jewish minority who was personally familiar with discrim-
ination and deeply committed to questions of racism and inequality, began
exposing the tacit interactional practices of racism as a graduate student at the
University of North Carolina in 1939, producing the first research on how tacit
presuppositions, labels, and accounts can become institutionalized such that
ordinary activities will, as a matter of course, categorize and disenfranchise,
without conscious intent. Taking the position that the rules and norms framing
the interactional work of communicating and presenting Self are usually taken
for granted and therefore both invisible and unconscious, Garfinkel argued that
these processes are essential to understanding society, but were being ignored by
sociology.1 Garfinkel proposed that examining the interactional work of mar-
ginal and disenfranchised persons (Black, Jewish, Transgender, mentally ill,
etc.), who have what W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) called a “double consciousness”
about the discrimination they face that heightens their awareness of interac-
tional work, can reveal not only the inequality they face, but also the underlying
moral requirements for successful interaction that they are denied.
Garfinkel’s work on Race, Gender, and other forms of inequality continued
to develop in the 1940s through his research for the Army during World War
II (in a psychiatric hospital) and after he arrived at Harvard in 1946. By 1947
he was documenting a need for reciprocity and mutual commitment to what he
called the “Trust Conditions” underlying interaction, showing that persons in
asymmetrical social positions (whose category/label is assigned without their
consent) have extra difficulty achieving mutual intelligibility with Others in in-
teraction (Garfinkel 1947, 1952a, 1952b, 1956, 1963, 2019, [1962] 2019). He was
the first to study how people are disenfranchised during interaction by asym-
metry in the assignment of the categories Negro/White (Garfinkel 1940, 1942);
Negro/Jew/Red/Criminal (Garfinkel 2012:20); in the assignment of labels
Sick soldier/Cured soldier (Garfinkel 1948b, 2006:154–62); through inequality

GARFINKEL: RACISM, INEQUALITY, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 91
embedded in frames and framing (Garfinkel [1947] 2012:33, 1948b, 2006:142–

43, 172); and by asymmetry built into the institutional “accounts” that embed
those frames, labels, and categories and the statistics they generate (Garfinkel
1940, 1942, 1949). Garfinkel also did early research on the performance of iden-
tity by the social Self in interaction—his first nine dissertation prospectuses
(Garfinkel 1948c) focusing on problems performing Jewish identity; and his fa-
mous study of “Agnes” and 14 other Transsexuals (e.g., Garfinkel 1948a, 1967a)
initiating research on “passing” and “intersexed” identity.2
These ideas all became important staples of sociological theory and research,
but they are not typically associated with Garfinkel. Not generally recognized for
his focus on inequality, or labeling, or his emphasis on the performative aspects
of Self, or Frames (which influenced Goffman), the revolutionary theoretical
and methodological implications of Garfinkel’s early work have been generally
overlooked.3 The problem has been exacerbated by a tendency to associate his
work with the turbulent anti-war Nixon era, rather than with the unified and
patriotic wartime 1940s. Garfinkel did not wait until the late 1960s to produce
work that challenged disciplinary assumptions. He started producing “radical”
work in the 1940s, and he did so in the context of the war to improve the science,
and in the company of intellectual elites like Howard Odum, Talcott Parsons,
Kenneth Burke, Jerome Bruner, Aaron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schütz, all of
whom were arguing that an adequate scientific approach to modernity required
big theoretical changes.
The collaborative work that Garfinkel later undertook with Parsons from 1958
to 1963, to develop an adequate approach to culture as interaction, built on this
early foundation (Rawls and Turowetz 2021. Garfinkel argued that inequality
makes a nonsense of interaction, grounding his approach on Parsons’s con-
ception of shared meaning and objects as situated achievements of interaction
in-its-course. Unfortunately, a turn against studies of interaction and toward sta-
tistics that took place in sociology during World War II (Rawls 2018) pushed
studies of social interaction from the center of sociology to its margins after the
war (Rawls and Turowetz 2019). While this marginalized Garfinkel, it did not
change his focus on either inequality, or situated interaction in-its-course. It also
negatively impacted Parsons. Garfinkel’s ([1962] 2019) manuscript on Parsons,
titled Parsons’ Primer, explains that Parsons’s position was misunderstood largely
because its grounding in social interaction was overlooked.
Garfinkel’s approach is distinctive in focusing on interactional processes—
the back and forth of “double contingency” and sequential reflexivity—rather
than on variables, or individuals; in emphasizing the work of “passing” and
“performing” identity in interaction in-its-course for achieving social catego-
ries; and in carefully tracing out the interactional “creation” and use of social
facts (labels, categories, objects, accounts, identity, information, etc.) in actual
situated interactions, rather than assuming they exist as epistemic objects inde-
pendently of interaction, which they can therefore mediate. Instead, Garfinkel
proposed the constitutive expectancies of interaction as the mediating force.
For Garfinkel (1948b:98), all signs in a modern society, even the more durable
symbols he referred to in (1948c) and (1948a) as “signposts,” acquire meaning
as the immediate result of a course of interaction. Insisting that studies of in-
teraction should focus on the back-and-forth exchange of the visible/hear-
able actions that comprise interaction, turn by turn, sequence by sequence,
Garfinkel, from the beginning, treated every creation of a social fact as a situ-
ated accomplishment (Garfinkel 1940, 1946, 1947, 1948a, 1948c). Whether the
moral conditions for this mutual creation are being met is also a situated matter
that varies across situations: Every instance of inequality interferes with sense-
making turn by turn.
When Garfinkel began working with Harvey Sacks, their joint discovery in
1962 of how detailed the order properties of interaction actually are, and the
degree to which they can be specified, enhanced their ability to demonstrate
this. To the extent that it is the tacit taken-for-granted character of constitutive
practices that hides and enables inequality, Garfinkel’s lifelong quest to docu-
ment the taken-for-granted in empirical detail is particularly important, laying
the groundwork for contemporary studies of how Race, Gender, and other
potentially stigmatized categories are actualized through taken- for-
granted
practices in situated interaction of all kinds.
Garfinkel’s approach to “systems of interaction” or interaction orders, and
morality as mutually constitutive, is one of the most important theoretical
innovations of the twentieth century. Various misunderstandings, plus the fact
that his position challenges conventional thinking, have made the argument dif-
ficult to understand. But the point is in essence quite simple: in homogeneous
contexts, persons attempting to communicate can assume a great deal of shared
meaning, in the form of signs, symbols, beliefs, and folkways. In diverse modern
contexts, however, this is no longer possible; the beliefs, situations, and values
are too varied. Thus, sociological approaches that do not distinguish the cooper-
ative making of meaning in diverse modern contexts, from meaning-making in
contexts grounded on practices that Garfinkel (1952b, 1967b) called tribal, fail to
capture the essential requirements for mutual intelligibility and social order in
modernity. These requirements, Garfinkel argues, involve cooperation and reci-
procity in the use of tacit “constitutive” practices that are not defined by folkways.
Achieving meaning always requires the cooperative use of shared practices (or
ethno-methods). But, in diverse modern contexts, constitutive practices must
be independent from social structure, uniquely tied not only to their situated
contexts of use, but also to their social and technical purposes, and they must be
attended equally by all participants, or they will not work.
To understand why the foundational premise of Garfinkel’s position—that

only moral/social objects (constituted through reciprocities of cooperation in
interaction) are objective—has been so consistently misunderstood, this chapter
will consider Garfinkel’s early work in its prewar and wartime context. Garfinkel
started graduate school with Howard Odum at North Carolina in 1939, at a
time when social justice was still considered a scientific issue (Rawls 2018). He
worked as a professional sociologist in the Army during World War II (1942–
1946), producing the first detailed “hybrid study of work” (Garfinkel [1943]
2019). Garfinkel was already 35 years old, and the author of over a dozen signif-
icant manuscripts, when he completed his PhD with Parsons at Harvard in June
1952. By the time Studies in Ethnomethodology was published in 1967, Garfinkel
had spent three decades laying the groundwork for a scientific sociology fo-
cused on the cooperative practices of making social facts as situated interactional
achievements, and elaborating the social justice issues involved in that interac-
tional process.
The mistake of situating Garfinkel in the 1960s has obscured the revolutionary
character of his early writing; its emphasis on Race and inequality, his indebted-
ness to influential mentors, and the responsiveness of his social justice focus to
disciplinary objectives. The tendency to consider Garfinkel a 1960s rebel, to treat
only his later work as “radical,” and to equate his approach with Schütz, only one
of many influential mentors with whom he worked (and the one most margin-
alized by the academy) has been problematic. Schütz’s influence was important,
but not more important than that of Parsons, Bruner, Burke, or Gurwitsch (see
Garfinkel [1962] 2019, for quotations from Garfinkel on this matter). Garfinkel’s
racial status also influenced his reception. During the 1940s Jewish scholars were
discriminated against and explicitly criticized for their continued commitment
to social justice issues which had come under fire as unscientific by disciplinary
leaders during World War II.4
Pursuing Social Justice at North Carolina,

1939–1942: Racial Inequality
When Garfinkel arrived at North Carolina in August 1939, having spent the
summer at a Quaker work camp in Georgia building an earth dam,5 the Sociology
Department, chaired by Odum, was already known as a center for “modeling,” an
abstract logical and quantitative approach. But, social theory at North Carolina
was taught under Odum (who collected Black folk narratives), with an emphasis
on the Action Theory of Florian Znaniecki and W. I. Thomas. The perspective of
the actor and the interest in interaction inspired by Znaniecki, Thomas, Cooley,
and Mead were serious issues, as was the Chicago School’s focus on ethnographic
field studies. Postwar “scientific” sociology, with its emphasis on aggregation and
generalization and its insistence that “real” science was neutral on questions of
justice, did not yet dominate the department.
Odum and Guy Johnson, another of Garfinkel’s mentors at North Carolina,
were committed to documenting the folkways and mores of the American South,
with an emphasis on racial issues and folkways in the Black community. They
encouraged Garfinkel to pursue field research documenting racial “accounting
practices” in 10 county courtrooms, with a focus on how Race impacted
decisions in murder trials. Odum and Johnson were well-known proponents
of an approach to civil rights that challenged the White Southern status quo.
Unfortunately, their challenge was limited by their theoretical commitment to
a need for stable folkways. Unlike Durkheim, who had argued that constitutive
practices could replace folkways, Odum and Johnson’s belief that stable folkways
are necessary to maintain social order meant they were not prepared to abandon
White Southern folkways, even though they disagreed with them. The slow
change in Race relations they advocated was criticized by civil rights activists and
White Southerners alike (Gilmore 2008:226–30). As a consequence, Odum went
from being an influential president of the American Sociological Association
(ASA) in 1930 to relative obscurity before his death in 1954. Unfortunately,
Garfinkel’s association with them may have obscured the radical character of his
approach to Race inequality.
The sociology Garfinkel found at North Carolina was multifaceted and uncon-
ventional. For instance, his insight that “accounts” reveal tacit aspects of social
order came from Kenneth Burke, a literary theorist whose work he encountered
there, not C. Wright Mills (1940) (who would, however, be a mentor of Sacks at
Columbia). Garfinkel’s grasp of the implications of “incongruity” for the coordi-
nation of action was inspired by Burke, Aron Gurwitsch, and Gestalt psychology.
Incongruity means that what one sees, hears, touches, tastes, etc., cannot be
made to match up with what was expected: it is incongruous and cannot be made
sense of. From Odum (1937, 1947) Garfinkel would have inherited the idea that
forms of practice (“technicways”), such as ways of lining/queuing up, or scien-
tific techniques not constrained by folkways, could develop suddenly, and could
resist and neutralize folk inequalities. The idea was in some respects similar to
Durkheim’s (1893) argument that constitutive practices of science can work in-
dependently of tradition. Odum (1943) noted that technical ways of lining up at
the post office in the segregated South that ignored Race and took everyone in
turn had developed in everyday interaction in spite of their conflict with folk-
ways. The big difference is that Durkheim’s constitutive practices require a moral
foundation very like Garfinkel’s Trust Conditions, whereas Odum, who located
morality exclusively in folkways, thought that technicways were morally neutral
and hence could be manipulated for evil purposes.
It is the insistence on a shared set of constitutive rules framed by a tacit social

contract that distinguishes constitutive practices and their moral requirements
in the work of Durkheim, Parsons, and Garfinkel (and later Goffman and Sacks)
from the rest of sociology.
As disciplinary leaders narrowed their view of sociology during the war,
turning away from fieldwork and advocating an increasing reliance on theoret-
ical and methodological abstractions and generalizations that moved away from
situated detail to facilitate statistics, his mentors at North Carolina, and later at
Harvard, encouraged Garfinkel to go against the grain and broaden his view of
sociology, supporting him in the collection of richer observational detail, and
signing off on a revolutionary MA thesis (Garfinkel 1942) that demonstrated how
generalizations and statistics can distort the social processes they are assumed to
accurately represent. As the discipline turned away from social justice issues as
“unscientific,” during the war, Garfinkel was showing how studies of social jus-
tice could be more scientific than the new “value-free” statistical research.
In his first two publications, Garfinkel explored the problems that arise when
institutional accounts, categories, and labeling practices embed inequality,
allowing its biased effects to make their way into institutional outcomes and the
resulting statistics. Written in 1940 and 1942 (published in 1940 and 1949), the
research examined practices used to create and maintain racial inequality on a bus
in Virginia, and in 10 county courtrooms in North Carolina. The reliance on tacit
racial presuppositions on the bus, Garfinkel said, created incongruity, making a
“nonsense” of the situation. The extensive use of racial accounts that was taken for
granted in the courtrooms rendered legal (statistical) outcomes in ethnocentric
and racialized terms. In other words, the supposedly objective statistics that rep-
resent those outcomes had racial bias built right into them. The verdicts of guilt or
innocence, as well as decisions about punishment, relied on racialized accounts as
assessments of character: an inevitable consequence when accounts that embed
inequality are accepted for use by one category of person at the expense of another.
In these early papers we see the outlines of Garfinkel’s later thinking on the
need for equality and reciprocity, the difficulties of presenting and managing
stigmatized identity, the relationship between Trust Conditions and nonsense;
and, the conflict between institutional accounts that enable inequality, and the
equality and reciprocity needed for sense-making.
“Color Trouble” 1940: Institutionalized Accounts

Enable Racism
Garfinkel’s (1940) first publication, “Color Trouble,” analyzed a racial incident

he observed on a bus ride from Newark New Jersey, where his family lived, to
North Carolina, where he was a graduate student. The bus stopped in Petersburg,
Virginia, on May 23, 1940 (Easter weekend). Many Black passengers left the bus,
leaving two Black passengers sitting in the middle seats, one of whom was, unbe-
knownst to Garfinkel, Pauli Murray, a famous Transgender civil rights activist.
Because of Murray’s presence, the incident became famous, has a presence in the
history of civil rights, and generated comparisons of Murray’s own account of the
incident with Garfinkel’s.6
The driver explained that he could not load new passengers and continue the
journey until the two Black passengers moved to the back of the bus: the Jim
Crow practice at the time. One of the two was dressed as a woman, the other as a
boy. They refused to move all the way back and pointed out to the driver that the
seat behind them was over the wheel and very uncomfortable, and that the one
behind that one was broken. They offered to move into the broken seat if he could
fix it. But they refused to sit over the wheel. The bus driver initially accepted the
compromise as preserving the appearance of Jim Crow rule, and said he would
try to fix the seat—which he did. The bus remained in Petersburg for two hours
as the incident unfolded.
The article reporting Garfinkel’s observations first appeared in the journal
Opportunity (published by the Urban League) within days of the incident in May
1940, and was then reprinted as if it were fiction in Best Short Stories of 1941 (and
again in Primer for White Folks, 1945). The 22-year-old Garfinkel did not write it
as fiction. While the analysis employs literary devices (representing the thoughts
of participants) that Garfinkel did not use in his later work, these devices are
used in this detailed ethnographic analysis to portray tacit presuppositions about
Race and inequality that he observed at work in the interaction. It is an inter-
esting early approach to making the tacit visible.
Garfinkel opened the article with the observation that the racial troubles he
observed were related to the institutional obligations of bus company workers,
“accounts” the company will accept for failures like lateness, “accident cards”
that need to be filled out to bolster such accounts, and how these clash with the
requirements for making sense in the interaction. If the company did not ac-
cept those accounts, the bus driver could still be a racist, but would have trouble
acting on his racism without getting fired. This pointed Garfinkel toward the
importance of institutional accounting practices. As Garfinkel (1940) set up the
problem in his first line:
According to the timetable, the bus traveling from Washington DC to Durham,

North Carolina, is scheduled to make the run in eight hours. . . . An inconspic-
uous footnote, however, serves to make this pronouncement less categorical,
for it points out, though in very fine print, that “the company will not be liable
for unavoidable delays.” (1940:97)
“Denial of ‘the rights and privileges of a free citizenry’ ” Garfinkel (1940:97) notes,
“can be accounted for as the cause of ‘unavoidable delays’ between Washington
and Durham.” The institutionally accepted account protects the driver’s job while
he enacts racism. A two hour delay that occurs at the bus driver’s insistence, is
accountable to the company as an “unavoidable delay” caused by “color trouble.”
Historians and civil rights activists have treated this now famous incident nar-
rowly in terms of civil rights issues. Their analysis has been critical of Garfinkel
for taking a conventional White perspective and missing the revolutionary char-
acter of the incident. But his analysis was not at all conventional. One reason for
their criticism is that the points being made by a sociologist and those made by
civil rights activists are quite different. For the civil rights activists the problem
is treated as a relatively straightforward question of “strategy.” For Garfinkel,
by contrast, there are many hidden social undercurrents that need to be con-
sidered. In other words, the situation is much more complicated than the civil
rights activists have seen. Garfinkel’s account supports some of the claims the
civil rights activists want to make. But he makes an even stronger case than the
civil rights activists do about how the racism involved actually works in the inter-
action, which has important implications for taking action on civil rights that the
civil rights activists missed.
The article as originally published in Opportunity was a detailed report on
and analysis of the incident Garfinkel had witnessed, with dates, times, and bus
routes supplied. It was not presented as fiction. It is also notable that Garfinkel
was concerned enough about what he had witnessed to get the article written and
published within days of its occurrence.
Most importantly, there is independent verification of the accuracy of
Garfinkel’s account. A comparison by Rosalind Rosenberg (2017), while critical
of Garfinkel, reveals only minor differences between the accounts by Murray and
Garfinkel: on the question of whether “accident cards” were given only to White
passengers, and whether the bus driver was “enraged” at the end. Both can be
explained by the different locations of Garfinkel and Murray in the bus (Garfinkel
at the front with the “White” passengers and Murray more than halfway back), as
Rosenberg herself notes.
In other words, the “facts” reported by the two accounts are remarkably sim-
ilar. It is what they make of the incident that differs. Garfinkel’s sociological focus
on tacit presuppositions and taken-for-granted interactional processes makes
for differences between his analysis and that of the historians and activists. When
the two Black passengers refuse to move to the back of the bus, for instance,
Garfinkel (1940:100) observes that everyone was initially “rendered actionless”
by the “denial of the commonplace.” Whereas the activists focused on analyzing
the “strategies” used by the activists, Garfinkel focused on how those “strate-
gies” impacted the taken-for-granted character of the interaction and its tacit
presuppositions. He focused on the inability of participants to make sense when

the commonplace was challenged—his focus on incongruity—the backbone
of his position and the reason he designed what were later called “breaching
experiments,” and “tutorial problems.” This adds an important analytic dimen-
sion to Garfinkel’s description of the protest.
Garfinkel portrays (1940:103) Murray’s companion, who appeared to be a ma-
ture woman in contrast to her young apparently male companion (Murray), as
continuing to “explain” to the driver, as if it was just “a failure of the two of them to
reach a rational common ground.” She was talking, Garfinkel (1940:104) says, as
if “right” was on her side: “Did you ever hear of the Constitution?” she asked the
driver. But the tacit expectations are not shared, so there is no common ground.
White participants do not know how to respond. Their tacit common-sense un-
derstanding is being violated. But Murray’s companion does not acknowledge
this. In fact, as a Northerner, it is not a tacit understanding she shares. For the
White participants, he says, “A logical argument is a disturbing thing, especially
when the answer comes out wrong” (Garfinkel 1940:105). Within their world-
view, what she says—a Black woman citing the Constitution—makes nonsense
of their racialized folkways, and therefore must be dismissed.
What initially made for a possible compromise wherein the passengers would
move two seats back, and why it later broke down, interests both Garfinkel
and the civil rights historians and activists. But their explanations differ. The
historians and activists focus on strategies, considering the two-hour discus-
sion a small victory, and try to identify a “tipping point” that would explain what
appeared to them as the driver’s sudden and unexpected decision to arrest them,
given that they had previously talked him into a compromise. Murray attributed
her partial success to the use of a Gandhi strategy (Satyagraha) of focusing on
truth and peace.
Garfinkel viewed the situation very differently. By contrast with the civil rights
historian’s focus on strategies, Garfinkel analyzed the tacit presuppositions that
White participants were using to try making sense of the incident and how the
discussion of Murray’s companion with the driver violates those presuppositions.
From Garfinkel’s perspective, the two-hour “discussion” happens because the
bus driver and then the police officer recognize that Murray’s companion is not
from “Virginia” and therefore does not understand the tacit rules that facilitate
Jim Crow. They immediately see that the usual ways of enforcing Race inequality,
which rely on the complicity of Black Southerners, will not work.
An issue that is typically handled implicitly is becoming explicit. They are forced
to improvise. Reluctant to arrest the two, making things even more explicit, and
causing further embarrassment and delay, they keep talking. Garfinkel’s socio-
logical analysis offers advice to the civil rights activists about what was important
in this situation. It is the bus driver’s realization that one of the Black passengers
does not understand how things work in Virginia that creates the possibility of
compromise, not the Gandhi strategy. However, before too long, the bus com-
pany will intrude into the situation via the driver’s obligation to be on time and
his available institutional account for lateness, that he had “color trouble” with
the bus—which undercuts the reciprocity (Trust Conditions) the activists were
relying on—and gives the driver a way out when his tacit presuppositions are fi-
nally openly breached.
Ultimately, in Garfinkel’s view, this happens because competing tacit
understandings of the terms “gentleman” and “lady” and their racial implications
in 1940 Virginia make it inevitable that a request (from Murray’s Black female
companion to the White bus driver) for an apology with a reference to herself
as a “lady” will result in arrest: a Black woman is excluded by asymmetrical cat-
egory assignment from being a “lady.” She went too far and the driver suddenly
sees that he has no “choice.”
Some commentators have argued that Garfinkel’s racial status explains the
differences between the accounts. This is unfortunate because it obscures the so-
ciological implications of his analysis. Rosenberg (2017:6), for instance, suggests
that Garfinkel may have been unable “to see anything wrong with the bus driver’s
giving accident cards [only] to whites,” because he was White. Garfinkel saw
a great deal wrong with the whole process, including the “accident cards.” It is
important to remember that he was a young Jewish minority traveling in the
American South at a time when being Jewish in the United States meant living in
stigmatized Jewish enclaves, and suffering from the social exclusion, dispropor-
tionate police surveillance, job exclusion, and the criminal careers that follow.
While Garfinkel is now usually considered “White,” he was often treated
as non-White, particularly in the South, where he lived from 1939 to 1946.7
According to Arlene Garfinkel (married 1943), when traveling they needed to
check ahead with hotels and restaurants to see if Jews were accepted. Many did
not accommodate Jewish travelers. Garfinkel’s life experience in the 1940s was
not that of a White man.8 He would certainly have considered it wrong that only
Whites received “accident” cards. But, for him, that inequality would not have
stood out from the rest: everything about the asymmetrical relations on the bus was
wrong and ultimately nonsense. The fact is that Garfinkel saw a lot more racism
on the bus than the activists did. His sociological position was that making sense
in interaction demands equality and reciprocity, which as a minority he knew he
was often denied. His account focuses on the bus driver’s ability to deny interac-
tional reciprocity; and the ability of Whites to frame, label, and categorize Black
passengers without their consent (an issue that he would take up again in his
analysis of American attitudes toward Russia in 1947).
In contrast to Murray, Garfinkel portrays White passengers as prepared to be
entertained by the spectacle of Black passengers being “put in their place.” This
two-hour interlude on the bus—which for Murray and her companion is a par-
tial success because they engaged the driver and police in “rights talk” for two
hours—in Garfinkel’s account—is anticipated as a boundary reinforcing enter-
tainment by White passengers—a ritualized display to reinforce for “insiders,”
Black and White—the unequal (asymmetrical) relationship in which they stand.
The police officer who came onto the bus to explain things to the two Black
passengers complained to the driver: “Why didn’t you tell me?” (Garfinkel
1940:103), which Garfinkel takes to mean that the officer was complaining that
the driver had not told him he was going to be dealing with Black people who
don’t know the rules and thus will not help him by publicly embracing their un-
equal status. This was the problem with “the boy”—he made sense—and that
sense made a “nonsense” of any attempt at a ritualized degradation ceremony.9
The expectation of the driver and other riders on the bus was that the interaction
would proceed in asymmetrical terms.
According to Garfinkel (1940:107), Murray’s companion was violating
a taboo and “saying things too bluntly.” The activists seem to chalk this up to
Garfinkel’s “White” identity. But it is actually a penetrating analysis of the tacit
presuppositions of White racism. In the context of Jim Crow in 1940s Virginia,
there were things that could not be said—but she was saying them. “Besides,” he
says, for White passengers “there was still a point of pride. Rights or no rights,
logic or no logic, she was still a Negro and had talked too damn loud” (Garfinkel
1940:105). Talk about Race, he says, has a taboo status, and assumptions about
Race are expected to remain tacit: you “mention them to your priest . . . but never
never shout” (Garfinkel 1940:107). Murray’s companion was openly challenging
the whole Southern status quo: something the White passengers, driver and po-
lice officer, needed to remain tacit because they have no good way of dealing with
it openly.
When the driver hands out accident cards for his report to the bus company
(to account for the “unavoidable delay”), Garfinkel (1940:108) portrays him as
“flustered.” Garfinkel continues: “He was an hour late, had been ill-advised, his
job might well be in the balance.” He portrays the passengers as discussing what
to write: “What did you write?” “What did you write?” “There really was no acci-
dent. How can you answer it?” “Look, look, he wrote ‘nonsense’ on his.”
At the end, Garfinkel (1940:113) describes the driver as enraged. Just as it
seemed he had a compromise worked out, Murray’s (1940:113) companion
requested an apology: “You’re a gentleman, and I’m a lady . . . and therefore . . . ,
I think that as a gentleman to a lady you owe me an apology.” Garfinkel’s “literary”
portrayal of the reaction to this is, “Good God in His everlasting mercy, did she
realize what she was doing?” He describes the driver: “Transfixed, the driver
stared down at her.” “This,” Garfinkel (1940:114) says, “was the opening, here
was something to understand; the fog had finally dissipated and the barriers
were down.” In Garfinkel’s account, the driver finally understands something

that makes further dialogue impossible: “He backed up with a snarl, ‘You
black . . .’ Growling and blind with rage, he was out of the bus in three clattering
leaps. ‘. . . fool . . .’ He was yelling for the police even before he was out of earshot.”
The breaking point for the driver, according to Garfinkel, is that the
“black . . . fool” wants an apology from a “gentleman” to a “lady.” At that point the
driver has nothing more to say. He is done—gone silent. Angry that his efforts
have failed. But, more importantly, enraged by the Race-neutral presumption
behind her request that challenges the foundations of his world. He leaps from
the bus. Compromise would have required the protesters to confirm the “proper
order” of things. The activists do not register this anger, and it is a point of differ-
ence between the two accounts. But Garfinkel, sitting at the front of the bus, was
well positioned to see it.
There are consequences all around when the compromise collapses: The driver
is embarrassed, the passengers are embarrassed. The whole social situation has
collapsed. It will now be necessary to reassert “normality”—which will require
some work. After Murray and her companion were removed from the bus and
arrested, the driver began to collect and read the accident cards. He: “. . . looked
up somewhat startled at one which read ‘Nonsense. Bone-head playing all
around’ ” (Garfinkel 1940:117).10
That the interruption of the local order of sense making is a serious issue for
everyone is illustrated by three departing Black passengers, all men, who initiate
a sequence of banter that the driver gratefully takes up:
The buzzer sounded and the bus slowed to a crunchy stop in order to discharge
three Negro passengers. Hunched over in anticipation of the low doorway,
the first one tapped the driver on the shoulder and waved his hand in friendly
greeting as he clattered out. “Thankya, boss.” The second did the same. The
third said nothing. His hand on the door lever, the driver called after them.
“Boy she sure didn’t come from Virginia, did she?”
“Ah shood say not,” the answer drifted down the length of the bus as the
group moved off.
He leaned toward the door, addressing the darkness. “Ain’t you boys glad you
live in Virginia?”
Again the answer, “You shoor said it, boss.”
There was no echo to the driver’s thin laughter.
(Garfinkel 1940:118–19)
This banter restores the appearance that all passengers are working with the same
set of tacit expectations. But it also underscores the divide between Black and
White passengers, and the need of White Southerners for cooperation from Black
Southerners in their own degradation: thereby revealing the impossibility of a

complete alignment.
That the bus driver is left laughing by himself, in spite of the ratification of
his “boss” status and verbal confirmation that it was the two Black passengers
who were in the wrong, underlines the problem. People can play lip service to
the “rightness” of the inequality. But it still hangs over everyone as an embar-
rassment. It has not remained hidden. It has lost its taken-for-granted status.
The chorus of “Thankya, boss” underlines the problem even as it mitigates it, by
making the inequality explicit.
Later studies by Garfinkel, and his students and colleagues, would docu-
ment how institutional accountability can interfere with reciprocity and Trust
Conditions, distorting both sense-making and statistical accounts (notably
Meehan 1987; Sudnow 1965; Weider 1974a; Wieder 1974b). The institutions that
most sociologists treat as the bedrock of democracy—including the police and
the “rule of law”—Garfinkel reveals as potential agents of inequality.
“Inter-Racial and Intra-Racial Homicide,” 1942: Racialized

Accounts Determine Legal Outcomes
Garfinkel’s second major work, his MA thesis of 1942 on “Inter-Racial and Intra-
Racial Homicide,” an abridged version of which was published in Social Forces
in 1949, focused on how courtroom outcomes that appeared statistically to
be “fair” were actually based on racialized accounts that were produced in the
courtroom as part of the trial. At a time when the discipline was advocating a
turn toward statistics, Garfinkel was demonstrating the pitfalls of a statistical ap-
proach, particularly in getting at issues of racial discrimination. The assumption
that research based on statistics is objective is naively wrong when the numbers
in question refer to things like trial outcomes that were produced using institu-
tional accounting processes that treated Race and racialized narrative accounts
as a taken-for-granted aspect of the legal decision-making process.
Working with the guidance and encouragement of Odum and Johnson,
Garfinkel undertook an ambitious thesis project that required him to do exten-
sive field research in 10 North Carolina county courthouses. His analysis focused
on narrative accounts about Race offered in court by persons involved officially
in the cases of the accused (including judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and
witnesses). These accounts he recorded by hand. Garfinkel found that accounts
produced for the court, which were highly racialized, played a significant role in
determining the outcome of cases. The puzzle was that when looked at statisti-
cally, the distribution of punishments by Race looked “fair.” Garfinkel realized
that the results of two contrasting sets of institutional accounts had the effect of
neutralizing each other so that statistically it looked as if Race were not playing an
important role in the determination of cases when in fact it was often playing the
determining role. Garfinkel realized that something like this could be happening
in any social institution to produce a false appearance of fairness or equity.
The way it worked was simple. Accounts were offered in court regarding the
moral character of both the offender and the victim: character assessments. These
accounts of moral order were framed in terms of shared cultural assumptions
about Race. In other words, Black and White men were not expected to be-
have the same way, and judgments of character reflected these not so tacit
presuppositions. Good White men contributed to the community. Good Black
men knew their place. Racialized judgments of “good” and “bad” character thus
became part of the court process. Simply put, Garfinkel found that “good” White
men were rewarded (with lenient sentences or dismissal) for killing “bad” Black
men. Similarly, “good” Black men could be rewarded for killing “bad” Black men
and “doing the community a favor.” Statistically (holding constant other factors)
White and Black men in these two cases had a similar statistical probability of
getting lenient sentences. In cross-Race Black/White homicides, White men
were rewarded for homicide, while Black men were penalized. But because most
homicide occurs within Race, these made up a very small percentage of the cases.
The more lenient sentences for White men killing Black men and Black men
killing bad Black men, Garfinkel found, canceled each other out and obscured the
racial bias. Not only was the fact that Black men were always penalized for killing
White men while White men were rewarded for killing Black men obscured, but
the fact that the decisions were based on racist narratives remained hidden. The
numbers were telling a big fat lie.
That the entire process was racialized was obscured by the statistical anal-
ysis, because the results canceled each other out. As a consequence, a situation
that in the courtroom was openly discussed in racialized terms appeared sta-
tistically to be the result of a just and fair legal process. It is a huge and contin-
uing social problem that social actions that are explicitly motivated by Race and
tacit assumptions about Race can look fair in the aggregate. It is also the case
that particular actions with no racial motivation can nevertheless have racist
outcomes if they reproduce racialized inequality, which is what the term “insti-
tutional racism” refers to.11
It is remarkable that given such a clear demonstration of how racism can be
rendered invisible by statistical accounts, it has become an accepted legal crite-
rion today in the United States that claims of Race and Gender discrimination
must be accompanied by statistical proof that an institution has a “pattern” of
bias. As Garfinkel demonstrated in 1942, this is often impossible—even in the
most explicit cases of institutional racism—because statistics (which measure
the outcomes of institutionally acceptable accounts—not events in the world)
can obscure the discriminatory practices in question such that outcomes appear
legally and morally fair when they are not.
For instance, in contemporary American society, most people believe that
there is a high Black crime rate and accept that as a justification for the high rate
of surveillance and arrest in Black communities. But the high Black crime rate
that justifies this differential treatment is nothing more than an “institutional ac-
count” produced by high rates of surveillance and arrest. The actual “real” world
incidence of crimes of various kinds has been shown by study after study to be
equally distributed across racial groups. In fact, if anything, White rates of actual
crime are higher due to a combination of greater opportunity and lack of negative
consequences. Furthermore, studies have shown that institutional workers un-
derstand how this works and can routinely manage institutional accounts such
that a statistical analysis will demonstrate compliance with various egalitarian
institutional and societal objectives, even when the actions in question violate
those objectives, and the outcomes reproduce racial inequality and exclusion.
Garfinkel’s early demonstration of this problem deserves more attention.
Social Objects and Social Justice at Harvard after the

War: 1946–1952
When he arrived at Harvard after the war in the summer of 1946, Garfinkel grav-
itated toward scholars (notably Parsons, Bruner, and Robert Bales) who focused
on the importance of democracy, the social and psychological dynamics of ine-
quality, and the effects of differential position on the ability to share objects and
meaning in modern societies. He was also surrounded by scholars who threw
themselves eagerly into the new idea that statistical analysis was the key to scien-
tific objectivity. But he continued to fight against this trend. It was Garfinkel’s ex-
perience that minorities and marginal persons like himself, the Black passengers
on the bus in Virginia, and the Black men he had observed in North Carolina
courtrooms experienced higher levels of incongruity and inequality than others.
He knew from his MA thesis research that statistics could hide this inequality,
and he now saw that sociology as a discipline was moving toward a naive em-
brace of statistics that would make the situation worse.
There were some categories of people, Garfinkel said, who experienced so
much incongruity that they were in themselves “natural experiments.” He in-
cluded Transsexuals and schizophrenics in this category, along with minorities
and sick soldiers, and began to center an approach to sociological theory and re-
search on this proposal. Whereas in the face of a challenge to their expectations he
found that White Americans were able to continue for some time trying to repair
and make sense of interaction, there were categories of persons who experienced
so much incongruity that they would switch interpretive frameworks at the first
indication of trouble. His first several PhD proposals (1948a, 1948c) focused
on this idea explicitly with regard to Jewish identity. In setting up the argu-
ment, Garfinkel was drawn to the narrative psychology of Bruner (with whom
Garfinkel worked in 1946–1947), which was inspired by Bruner’s experience
with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) interviewing French townspeople in
1944 about collaboration with the Nazis, the Gestalt psychology of Gurwitsch
(with whom he met regularly in Cambridge), and the work of theorists of per-
ception (including Adelbert Ames, Kurt Lewin, and Egon Brunswik).
With Parsons as his mentor/advisor, Garfinkel took up the challenge of giving
interactional incongruity a theoretical foundation in sociology. In three papers
written in 1946–1947, his first year as a PhD student, Garfinkel sketched out his
position, including the beginnings of what would become his famous Trust ar-
gument. In 1947 he also wrote a long dissertation proposal which was published
in 2006 as Seeing Sociologically (Garfinkel 2006). In addition, he wrote a series of
dissertation proposals in 1948 titled “The Jew as a Social Object” (Turowetz and
Rawls 2021). The four papers and manuscripts from 1946–1947, the dissertation
proposals from 1948, along with five others (from 1946–1947), were the foun-
dation for his dissertation,12 The first of the four papers, “Some Reflections on
Action Theory and the Theory of Social Systems” (Garfinkel 1946), written for
a course, reformulated Parsons’s Social Action Theory. The second and third pa-
pers “Notes on the Information Apperception Test” (Garfinkel 1947) and “The
Red as an Ideal Object” (Garfinkel 2012) were based on research Garfinkel did
in the spring of 1947 at the Harvard social research laboratory, with Bruner,
Brewster Smith, and a large research team. The dissertation proposal from 1947,
referred to as the 1948 manuscript (Garfinkel [1948] 2006), attempted to pull
everything together. Garfinkel not only fine-tuned his understanding of ac-
counts, labels, categories, and Trust Conditions during this period, it was also his
first encounter with using transcribed audio data to study interaction, a method
he would use for his own dissertation. When he published a version of his MA
thesis in 1949, Garfinkel used the categories and symbolic typologies he had
worked out in “The Red” to frame the analysis.
While Garfinkel agreed with Parsons that sociology needed a theory of ac-
tion, he argued that it should focus on what happens between people/actors in
interaction; what was missing from sociology, he said, was an understanding of
how social objects, categories, labels, etc., are constituted in the back-and-forth
of interaction, and how much that process relies on equality. Without such a
theory, he argued, social research was coming to be more and more naively based
on untested assumptions that embed inequality. Since the details of interac-
tional reciprocities are constitutive of meaning, his new approach would require
researchers to observe, record and analyze interactional details in situ—rather
than resorting to generalizations. Within a few years, in 1949, Parsons (1950,

1951) would refocus his own theory on interaction, bringing his position closer
to Garfinkel’s, and the two would collaborate from 1958 to 1963 on a general in-
teractional approach to a theory of social systems. While Parsons (1951) placed
the process of “double contingency” at the center of his theory and came to em-
brace the significance of interaction, he never accepted Garfinkel’s requirement
that the actual empirical processes involved needed to be examined in constitu-
tive details.
Respecifying Social Action Theory: 1946
Garfinkel wrote “Some Reflections on Action Theory and the Theory of Social
Systems” for a seminar he took at Harvard in the summer or fall of 1946 in which
Parsons participated. The paper argued that a workable theory of action needs a
theory of the object. Even taking into account Garfinkel’s relative maturity at the
time (he was 29), the manuscript is remarkable. In 17 single spaced pages, he laid
out a comprehensive appraisal of social action theory and the changes it needed,
which he would follow throughout his career.
The main problem, in Garfinkel’s view, was that Parsons’s action theory had
no theory of the object. Additionally, Garfinkel argued, while Parsons had rec-
ognized that interaction is of central importance, he had not focused on actual
interaction, but on the actor’s point of view. Garfinkel exposed the assumptions
and concerns that contributed to these shortcomings, with the objective of
respecifying social action theory around a new theory of the object. On the other
hand, he argued that Parsons’s functionalism could not be fixed. It suffered from
a circularity which required that it be eliminated entirely.
His critique of Parsons is penetrating. While Garfinkel credited Parsons with
a radical departure from conventional empiricism, he argued that in retaining
a realist correspondence theory of reality, and invariant categories, Parsons
had not been radical enough, inadvertently building on unexamined assump
tions. Thus, Parsons retained what Garfinkel called “ethnocentrism” (cultural
assumptions) when he meant to focus objectively on the empirical dimension
of social interaction.
Garfinkel specified two things a theory of action must do, and he explained
how all existing theories fail to do these two things: first, a theory of social ac-
tion must explain how social objects are created and sustained; and, second, it
must take the problem of how incongruities are handled into account to explain
the possibility of sustained coherences in social contexts not characterized by
what Garfinkel called “tribal” consensus. By “social objects,” Garfinkel meant
everything that is given meaning in interaction; including identity (role), words,
symbols, rationality, information, and “things” like tables, chairs, smokes (as op-
posed to cigarettes), etc.
Notes on the Information Apperception Test: 1947
During his third semester at Harvard in the winter/spring of 1947, Garfinkel

worked as a graduate assistant for a research project on American attitudes to-
ward Russia with an interdisciplinary team that included Bruner, the influen-
tial psychologist who introduced the cognitive implications of shared narrative
to psychology. Garfinkel wrote two manuscripts in 1947 based on his partici-
pation in this project (“Notes on the Information Apperception Test” and “The
Red as an Ideal Object”). The relationship with Bruner was of particular impor-
tance. Bruner had entered Europe with military intelligence immediately after
D-Day, and his experience interviewing French villagers who had just been lib-
erated from the Nazis inspired his narrative approach to psychology. Listening
to accounts of their relationship with the Nazis, Bruner realized how powerful a
shared narrative view of the world could be. It enabled a view of daily life under
Nazi occupation that rendered things, including collaboration, as seemingly ac-
ceptable which would have been inconceivable in “normal” times. According to
Bruner, he and Garfinkel discussed these experiences at length.13 The idea that a
narrative framing of the world shapes cognition, what a person actually perceives
and how they reason about it—the foundation of Bruner’s psychology—appears
in Garfinkel’s (1947, [1948] 2006) early writing as “Cognitive Style.”14
Garfinkel’s (1947) unpublished manuscript about this research project, “Notes
on the Information Apperception Test,” analyzes a test that he administered for
the project on American attitudes toward Russia.15 As a detailed account of a
testing situation and the theoretical implications of the constitutive reciproci-
ties between participants that were taken for granted by the research design, it is
remarkable. Insights about tacit assumptions (constitutive background expec-
tations) that must hold between interviewer and interviewee for talk to be mu-
tually intelligible relate directly to Garfinkel’s argument that inequality prevents
the achievement of mutual intelligibility. His insistence that properties of the
situation organized the results, such that results were actually about the testing
situation, rather than the personality dynamics the others thought they were
measuring, is his earliest detailed account of what it means to say that meaning is
achieved over the course of an interaction and thus must be explained within the
same constraints. Garfinkel’s own testing of Trust Conditions began in 1947 with
students from Harvard Chemistry courses.
The aim of the project was to assess the attitudes of Americans toward Russia,
and test various psychological and sociological correlates of those attitudes.
There were 10 subjects who cooperated in an in-depth interviewing process and

17 social scientists involved in the interviewing. In total, 28 different interviews
and/or tests were administered to each subject.
The Information Apperception Test (IAT) that Garfinkel administered was
procedure number 25. By the time he gave the test, the subjects had already been
interviewed or tested 24 times by other project researchers, and there had been
many meetings of the full research team to formulate an assessment of each case.
Garfinkel’s task was to test those case assessments. The procedure involved creating
anxiety to see how subjects would respond when their opinions were challenged.
The 27th procedure was a “Stress” interview, after which there was a closing inter-
view, and then the subject was finished (Smith, Bruner, and White 1956).
While Garfinkel did not give the Stress interview, his test involved produ-
cing anxiety, and he would have heard audio recordings of the Stress interview
discussed at group meetings. His manuscript suggests that the procedure of
inducing anxiety was disturbing to him and the stressful conditions created by
some of the questions he was told to administer are the subject of much anal-
ysis in Garfinkel’s report of his testing activities. He was interested in the tacit
conditions that made such testing possible. What was being assumed and there-
fore remained unexamined? What presuppositions about mutuality was he vio-
lating in creating anxiety?
While the rest of the research team focused on analyzing results from the total
battery of 28 tests, Garfinkel focused on his experience with the IAT test alone.
He asked what the test situation assumes, and what the work is of both giving
and taking the test. In keeping with his earlier research on Race and labeling,
he noted the asymmetry of knowledge about the test between the tester and the
person being tested, and asked how they achieve mutual understanding in the
face of this asymmetry. He exposed the tacit assumptions that the other social
scientists took for granted in analyzing answers to the test items.
While the others thought they were testing their own earlier assessments of
personality, Garfinkel disagreed. He argued that the test was self-organizing.
They did not treat the test situation itself as in any way constitutive of the test
results: it was treated rather as a neutral conduit. According to Garfinkel (1947:1),
they were assuming that “the facts of social perception, personality dynamics,
and social structure, as they are referable to a given subject are related to each
other through a general theory of social order.” Garfinkel argued, by contrast,
that the test is constitutive of its results. If the test is constitutive of its results, then
in what sense, he asks, do those results implicate personality and/or social struc-
ture, as the project design assumed?
Garfinkel’s description of the purpose and design of the IAT is an interesting
counterpart to the published volume. Where the volume describes the aims of
each test, Garfinkel describes the testing procedure and the tacit assumptions
behind it. For Garfinkel the test is not about Russia or things Russian. The im-
plied question, Garfinkel says (1947:2), is “whether and how the types of objects
seen, their relationships to each other, and the kinds of reactions of the Subject to
them will vary” according to aspects of the test itself.
As in his earlier research, Garfinkel maintained that what was being taken for
granted obscured the social processes involved such that researchers focused
on the wrong things: overlooking deep questions of sense-making that were in-
volved in the test situation itself.
Garfinkel’s approach to the tacit issues embedded in the research design was
so sophisticated that the others could not see his point. This is evident in Smith’s
comments on his manuscript. One of Garfinkel’s points, that “anything can mean
anything,” such that particular meanings must be settled sequentially, and not on
the basis of imported understandings, Smith dismissed with the comment “Can
anything mean anything? Is not the meaning an essential part of the experience?”
Of course it is. But Garfinkel’s point is that certainty of meaning is achieved through
the coherence of the test-taking experience itself. Smith was taking meaning for
granted. Garfinkel argued, by contrast, that coherent meaning is a cooperative
achievement. Meaning can change. The feedback loop is at work. Something that
meant one thing can suddenly mean something else in the next turn. So, yes, any-
thing can mean anything and therefore that it means something particular calls for
explanation. It is the cooperative use of constitutive practices that allows fragile
indexical meanings to achieve certainty. This is why reciprocity is necessary: the
central premise of ethnomethodology, as Garfinkel would later develop it.
In an article developed from the IAT experience, titled “The Red as an Ideal
Object,” completed in late spring of 1947 (Garfinkel 2012), Garfinkel refers re-
peatedly to difficulties faced by persons who are asymmetrically assigned cat-
egories he refers to as “Jews,” “Negroes,” “Reds,” and “Criminals,” expecting
the performance of Self to be more difficult, the Trust Conditions less likely to
be met, and the consequences of failed reciprocity more serious for persons
assigned these labels (an argument he went on to elaborate in his dissertation).
Garfinkel’s point is that while all four categories constitute marginal statuses,
the social practices by which marginality is accomplished are different in each
case. The relationship of each category to the institutionalized norms of the com-
munity is also different. This in turn results in a different positioning of possibili-
ties vis-à-vis the majority for each labeled minority.
Conclusion
Amidst the turbulent 1960s, when issues of social justice again came to the fore-
front, Garfinkel was often portrayed as advocating moral neutrality and then
criticized for being indifferent to moral issues. This is ironic, since his entire po-
sition rests on a moral foundation of implicit social contact. However, Garfinkel’s
studies of how minorities and marginal persons are differentially impacted by
asymmetrical categories, labels, and accounting practices illuminated more than
inequality. These interactional processes and their constitutive organization hold
the key to explaining the possibility of coherent democratic public life. They
also show how fragile it is. This should give studies of how people enact Race
and Gender inequality a special position in contemporary sociology. They are
not only studies of inequality—they are evidence of an important but missing
theoretical point: the fragile social objects of modernity, as Garfinkel (and
Durkheim) argued, require a degree of reciprocity and cooperation that is not re-
quired by the durable symbols of the tribe. A mutual commitment to reciprocity
conditions—Trust Conditions—defines this morality and must be present for in-
teraction to work. In contexts of inequality, the frames, accounts, and labeling
practices of folkways and formal institutions resist the required reciprocity, cre-
ating an asymmetry that interferes with sense-making.
Garfinkel’s discovery that reciprocity and equality are requirements for
making coherent sense and Self in diverse modern contexts explains how an in-
quiry that began with a focus on Race and Inequality became a comprehensive
theoretical/research approach to modernity in all of its aspects, including science
and technology and human machine communication. In making this argument,
Garfinkel was building on the work of his mentors: Parsons, his PhD advisor,
had advocated studying culture as an independent domain of interaction in-its-
course (Parsons 1950); Burke had proposed a “Grammar of Motives”; Odum
(1937) had proposed “technicways” as a new type of social practice that made
rapid social change possible when folkways resist change; Bruner had given him
the idea of “cognitive style”; and Schütz had pioneered an approach to the study
of embodied courses of action. Building on their insights, Garfinkel went fur-
ther: his ethno-methods comprising a morally grounded “way” of cooperatively
making modern social facts that is independent of broader social structures.
In his presidential address to the ASA in 1949, while Garfinkel was working
on his dissertation with him, Parsons (1950) argued that culture should be
studied as an independent domain. This is exactly what Garfinkel did. In a 1961–
1962 draft of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel titled his first chapter “The
Discovery of Culture.” The relationship with Parsons was profound. But, by the
time Studies was published, sociology had taken a conservative turn, and Parsons
was no longer at the helm. Odum died in 1954, leaving the idea of technicways
to languish (Vance 1972), and Schütz died in 1959. The eclectic studies of the
prewar period were shortly to be thoroughly replaced by statistical analysis fo-
cused on “objective” and “value-free” variables (Rawls 2018).
While his friends Jerome Bruner and Herbert Simon (a friend from Princeton,
1952), who shared his theoretical concerns, went on to hugely influence their
respective disciplines (Bruner as president of the American Psychological

Association in 1974; Simon winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978),
they also faced resistance from scholars wedded to positivist individualism. As
late as 1997, Simon was still complaining about this (Simon 1997). However, as
deeply as they had challenged their disciplines, Bruner (1990) authoring a cul-
tural psychology focused on the role of narrative in organizing cognitive pro-
cesses, and Simon insisting on empirical examination of actual decision-making
in real-world situations of “bounded rationality” (a social contract idea), both
left essential disciplinary assumptions intact. In particular, they assumed the
ability to communicate and left the epistemic object and rational actor to some
extent intact.
Garfinkel took the more revolutionary position that without mutual coopera-
tion—Trust—in the use of shared constitutive practices, social objects (including
the individual actor and rationality) do not exist, and communication and shared
meaning are not possible. This epistemological approach reverses what is objec-
tive and subjective. Garfinkel agreed with Durkheim (Rawls 2004) that the pos-
itivist assumption that epistemic objects exist without cooperative work makes
social science “subjective:” To be “objective,” social science needs to be grounded
on the constitutive character of social facts and social fact-making processes.
Having taken a more radical approach, Garfinkel paid the consequences. In
challenging the epistemic character of social objects—including language—and
treating all social objects, including “information,” as created through consti-
tutive practices that are engaged in cooperatively by competent “members” of
practices, Garfinkel even challenged the foundational character of Bruner’s nar-
rative psychology and Simon’s “bounded rationality.” Going further than his
friends, he faced greater resistance. The irony is that the constitutive character of
social facts shows human reason to be less limited, reveals that communication
is more important, and gives social justice firmer epistemological grounding. It is
the kind of reversal that Wittgenstein (1953) achieved in philosophy. The limita-
tions of positivism are overcome and, as Durkheim (1893) argued, questions of
justice are recast on firm empirical footing.
Garfinkel’s challenge to conventional thinking cut deeper and the
misunderstandings he faced have been more profound, but the potential
gain for social thought—and for addressing questions of social justice—is
also more significant.
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4
Garfinkel’s Studies of Work
Michael E. Lynch
Introduction
In the early 1970s, Harold Garfinkel launched a program of ethnomethodo-

logical studies of work, which became a major focus of his and his students’ re-
search in the decades following the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology
(Garfinkel 1967). The aim was to come to terms with the distinctive practices
that constitute professional and occupational activities, as well as recreational
pursuits and ordinary activities that are not usually remunerated. This pro-
gram has been taken up in research within and beyond ethnomethodology
and conversation analysis. This chapter reviews what Garfinkel envisioned,
and takes stock of how the program developed in the decades after he first
announced it.
The studies of work program has been incorporated into ethnomethodo-
logical and conversation analytic investigations of practices in the natural
and social sciences, mathematics, hi-tech workplaces, law and criminal jus-
tice, education, the arts, and everyday life. In addition to contributing to soci-
ology, the program also has made inroads into science and technology studies,
communication and information science, and science and mathematics ed-
ucation, among other fields. But, despite the sizable number of studies that
have taken up Garfinkel’s initiatives, his radical vision for studies of work has
been only partially realized. This should not be surprising, given that his pro-
gram has been called an “improbable” sociology—a sociology that might very
well be impossible for all professional purposes.1 In Garfinkel’s estimation,
many efforts to adopt, adapt, or represent the studies of work program were
compromised versions. Consequently, questions remain about what it would
take to carry out this program, as well as what consequences can be imagined
from an effort to follow through with it. In order to come to terms with such
questions, this chapter discusses what is distinctive about the program. It also
discusses how Garfinkel’s “improbable sociology” provides insight into con-
tinuing ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research on practical
actions.
Garfinkel’s Studies of Work 115
Work as a Topic
When Garfinkel’s announced the studies of work program in the early 1970s,
he certainly knew that he and other ethnomethodologists had been studying
work all along. Many of the earliest ethnomethodological studies focused on
the work of professional staff, clients, and subjects at hospitals and clinics,
suicide prevention centers, law courts, prisons, and many other bureaucratic
and occupational settings (Heritage 1984:294). A not-insignificant amount of
attention also had been given to the quotidian work of doing professional so-
ciology, such as in Garfinkel’s (1967:19ff.) discussions of researchers’ efforts
to implement a coding scheme for analyzing clinic records. However, when
announcing the studies of work program in the 1970s, he proposed a radically
different approach to occupations, professions, arts, sciences, and everyday
life than could be found in previous sociological (including ethnomethodo-
logical) studies.2
The radical difference had to do with an explicit recognition that many con-
temporary activities not only deploy distinctive methods, they also explicate
their own methodologies: canonical procedures, organizational standards, and
constituent practices. Sociology’s epistemic and literary resources often pale by
comparison to the extensive bodies of writing and practical instruction avail-
able in other fields. So, for example, the literatures in sociology of science, art,
medicine, and law are dwarfed by the popular, academic, and didactic accounts
written by practitioners. Even many recreational and “do-it-yourself ” pursuits
are supported by large literatures and online resources. In addition to exemplary
stories, “how to” manuals, recipe books, and the like, such literatures also include
practitioners’ “philosophical” reflections and methodological debates. Garfinkel
also noted that the literary and oral traditions in many fields include endogenous
sociologies or anthropologies of the relevant organized activities, and he refused
to grant professional sociologists or anthropologists (ethnomethodologists in-
cluded) with a special epistemic authority or reflexive capacity with which to su-
persede such “lay sociologies” with professional versions.
Faced with such a rich and intricate tapestry of practices, Garfinkel saw no
prospect for developing a stable and elaborate body of concepts, theories, and
methods that would encompass practical actions of all kinds. Consequently,
he did not propose that ethnomethodology would become a general science of
practical actions because, most obviously in the natural sciences but certainly in
other fields as well, the territory already was occupied by legitimate claimants.
Instead, he suggested that ethnomethodology would be paired, and even hybrid-
ized, with an open-ended variety of other sciences and arts of practical action
integral to particular fields (Garfinkel 2022:28).
The work to be studied in the studies of work program included occupations

and professions, such as those listed in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles,3
but it also included artistic and recreational activities (Garfinkel 2007:27). As
Crabtree et al. (2009:880) point out, studies of work are not limited to remu-
nerated activities associated with distinctive professions, occupations, or
institutions. They also include recreational pursuits (Tolmie and Rouncefield
2013), and everyday activities. Garfinkel also used the word work in connection
with the immediate embodied production of virtually any coherent, socially or-
ganized practice, such as the work of driving in traffic, or the work of looking
around one’s house for a lost set of keys.
The “Missing What”
The explicit aim of the studies of work program was to investigate the “whatness”
of organized activities. By “whatness,” Garfinkel meant the distinctive embodied
practices, and uses of instruments, texts, and other equipment, that constitute the
work itself. Initially, he used the term quiddity to dignify “whatness” with a der-
ivation from the Medieval Latin term quidditas, often translated as the “nature”
or “essence” of a phenomenon (Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston 1981:133). He
later adopted a more obscure term from Medieval scholastic philosophy, haec-
ceity: “thisness” or “just thisness” (Garfinkel 2002:99n., 249). He preferred that
term, because it allowed him to avoid any suggestion of essentialism, and more
sharply to highlight the singular performance of practical actions. He argued
that the very production of music by musicians, discoveries by scientists, and
aggregate traffic patterns by drivers is missed by social science studies that take
for granted the identity and detailed practices of an occupation, profession, or
other organized activity, while focusing on social, cultural, political, economic,
and psychological aspects of the work.
When introducing the studies of work program, Garfinkel credited Harvey
Sacks with identifying a “missing what” in social studies of practical activities: a
massive domain of social phenomena that, virtually without exception, sociolog-
ical and administrative studies rely upon, make use of, and yet ignore:
Ethnomethodological studies of work began in 1972 with Harvey Sacks’s obser-

vation [in personal communication with Garfinkel] that the local production
of social order existed as an orderliness of conversational practices upon whose
existence all previous studies depended, but missed. (Garfinkel 1986:vii)
Garfinkel also credited David Sudnow with qualified success in exemplifying

how to investigate the embodied work of an organized and highly skilled activity.
While praising Sudnow’s effort to engage with and describe the work (or, rather,
the improvisational play) of professional jazz musicians, he noted that Sudnow’s
study initially was limited to an examination of “ethnographic materials,” and
later to “single person improvisational jazz- piano playing and improvised
touch typing,” instead of explicating the relevant ensemble practices (Garfinkel
1986:vii; alluding to Sudnow 1978, 1980, 2001).
Garfinkel proposed that the “missing what” is made up of distinctive organ-
izations of competent practice that make up the performance of particular arts,
sciences, and technical professions, as well as more ubiquitous activities in a
given society. In his view, the “missing what” is nothing other than the practices
themselves, as coordinated embodied performances, identical with, carried out
through, and constitutive of socially organized activities.
One might wonder how Garfinkel could imagine that previous sociological
and organizational studies could possibly have missed something so obvious,
given the substantial number of available studies of occupations, professions, or-
ganizations, and everyday life activities. During the heyday of the Chicago School
of sociology, dozens of students turned out descriptive case studies on all kinds
of elite and humble professions and occupations, as well as on vagrant and “de-
viant” activities not listed in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Using partic-
ipant observation methods, such studies portrayed daily conduct in institutions
such as hospitals, prisons, and asylums; and they attempted to convey the points
of view of different participants in those institutions. In order to distinguish the
program he was initiating from previous ethnographies, Garfinkel occasion-
ally used the expression “the Howard Becker phenomenon.”4 In an unpublished
manuscript, Garfinkel credited Sudnow with having come up with the phrase:
To take Becker’s studies for example we learn that there are jazz musicians,
where they work, who they work with, what they earn, how they get their jobs,
or what the audience will request of them. But . . . a curiosity of the reportage,
Sudnow points out is that Becker’s articles speak of musicians’ work and do so
by omitting entirely and exactly the practices that for those engaged in them
makes of what they are doing . . . : making music. . . . In that musicians are to-
gether in that place for the so-and-what they are doing, Becker’s account takes
on its character as the thing it can be about. But it can be about that in a sin-
gular way. Sudnow points out that even though it was written by a jazz musi-
cian, it is an appreciation of the work of jazz musicians. (Garfinkel n.d.; quoted
in Tolmie, Benford, and Rouncefield 2013:228, ellipses and emphasis in Tolmie
et al. quotation)
Garfinkel made clear that Becker and other professional sociologists do not
“miss” the “what” of the specific practices they describe through an oversight or
lapse. Instead, they miss it as a consequence of the very coherence and integrity
of their discipline. Sociologists have their own hard-won professional interests,
methods, and interpretive schemes with which to study practices in other fields.
Commitment to the discipline also sets up critical, competitive, or adversarial
relations with formal and informal accounts given by professionals in fields such
as psychiatry, criminal justice, and school administration. A sociologist’s per-
sonal background in the relevant profession can provide an initial basis for un-
derstanding and contesting official practitioner versions, but the professional
literature, concepts, and theories in sociology usually provide the basis for an-
alytic and critical commentary. In contrast, Garfinkel suspended, and even ac-
tively eschewed, the authoritative use of disciplinary theory and methodology as
a basis for knowing other and better than what qualified practitioners say about
the organization of their activities.
Garfinkel’s indifference toward professional social science concepts and
methods was more than a rhetorical exercise in “anti-professionalism” (Fish
1989:215ff.). It was instead an effort to come to grips with how lay and profes-
sional activities of all kinds constitute particular social orders. Philosophers
of social science such as Alfred Schütz (1962) and Peter Winch (1958:89)
had previously argued that social studies take up concepts and pragmatic
understandings that are available to members of the societies they study and
translate them into second-order constructs. These constructs then provide
professional social scientists with methodological resources for distinguishing
native common-sense beliefs from the analytical knowledge particular to
the sociological discipline. When discussing sociological and psychological
conceptualizations of, for example, “rationality” and “motives,” Schutz and
Winch questioned the independence of such second-order constructs from
ordinary (first-order) uses of those terms to explain, praise, or condemn con-
duct. In line with their arguments, Garfinkel eschewed giving priority to social
science concepts and methods, and instead proposed to examine how vernac-
ular usage and routine practices are methodically produced and ordered in
their own right. In the case of the “vernacular of the laboratory” (Senior 1958),
and practices in specialized fields of all kinds, Garfinkel suggested that such
ordinary practices constitute specific social arrangements, and display spe-
cialized understandings of those arrangements. In other words, he suggested
that technical methods particular to science, music, etc., are themselves so-
cial activities, and further that technically specific understandings of those
practical activities are distinctive sociologies (Garfinkel et al. 1988; Garfinkel
2022). This proposal seemed to disrupt the contemporary division of intel-
lectual and methodological labor between sociology and other academic and
non-academic practices, and it also appeared to forgo the hard-won, and still
fragile, autonomy of the sociological discipline. As we shall see, the disruption
was a deliberate effort to create the space for a radically different sociological
initiative.
Studies of Scientific and Technical Practices
Although there initially was no direct connection between them, Garfinkel’s

treatment of the “missing what” resonated with contemporaneous programmatic
developments at the new Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh.
This program, which became known as the “Strong Programme” in the soci-
ology of scientific knowledge, was most directly associated with sociological
and social-historical research at Edinburgh. Proponents of this and related
approaches to the sociology of scientific knowledge included David Edge, David
Bloor, Barry Barnes, Steven Shapin, and Donald MacKenzie at Edinburgh, and
Michael Mulkay, Harry Collins, Simon Schaffer, Trevor Pinch, and many others
at other sites in the UK and elsewhere. The Strong Programme is now viewed
as an important phase in the history of the interdisciplinary field of science and
technology studies (sometimes dubbed science, technology, and society, with
both names covered by the acronym STS), which marked a transition from the
“old” to the “new” science studies, though what was new then is by now well past
its middle age.
Bloor (1976:3ff.) proposed that the Strong Programme would be strong be-
cause it took as its primary topic “the very content and nature” of the natural
sciences, instead of relegating such contents to philosophical epistemology and
specialized scientific methodology. In contrast, a “weak” sociology of science—
such as what Bloor and his colleagues ascribed to research by Robert Merton
(1973) and his many students in North American sociology—would leave the
science to the scientists while analyzing general norms, reward structures, and
professional networks characteristic of the institution.
Bloor also distinguished the Strong Programme from what he called “the so-
ciology of error,” which he attributed to Karl Mannheim’s (1936) sociology of
knowledge.5 “The sociology of error” referred to the assumption that social
explanations of specific beliefs apply only when those beliefs are questionable,
are held by some groups and not others, or are held for a time before being
superseded. Explanations that impute ignorance, vested interests, mythology,
or ideology to particular beliefs are cases in point. In place of such a “weak” ex-
planatory agenda (“weak” because it does not apply to the contents of “true” or
“rational” beliefs), Bloor proposed an “impartial” program of explanation that
would apply to any substantive knowledge, regardless of its current credibility,
legitimacy, and efficacy. This program would be “symmetrical” in the sense
that social explanations referring to such matters as socialization processes,
traditions, interests, communal agreements, and presuppositions would apply to

(apparently) universal knowledge as well as particularistic beliefs.6
Superficially, Bloor’s critique of sociology’s neglect of the contents of the sci-
ences was akin to Garfinkel’s more general argument about the “missing what”
in studies of occupations and professions. Moreover, Bloor’s postulate of im-
partiality also was partly akin to the policy of ethnomethodological indiffer-
ence (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970): the proposal that ethnomethodological study
applies to all methods, regardless of whether they are deemed reliable or intrin-
sically important, as opposed to being vulgar, dubious, or trivial. There also are
key differences between Bloor’s and Garfinkel’s projects, some of which are quite
obvious and others less so (Button and Sharrock 1993; Lynch 1993), but for the
present, it is enough to say that the partial convergence between ethnomethod-
ological studies of work and the new sociology of scientific knowledge opened
up interest in detailed observational studies of the “contents” of natural scientific
and mathematical practices.
Ethnographic Studies of Work in the Sciences
The Strong Programme and related developments in the sociology of scientific

knowledge linked up with more widespread questioning of the adequacy of
formal methods and reconstructive logics for describing actual scientific prac-
tice. It seemed to follow—and indeed it did follow—that ethnographies of sci-
entific work in laboratories and other places where scientists engaged in and
publicly exhibited their research would shed light on such practices. Starting in
the mid-1970s, a series of ethnographies took up this agenda; several of them
invoked ethnomethodology, among other influences, and in some cases they
made use of recorded and transcribed exchanges at the laboratory bench. Latour
and Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life was the first of these to be published as
a monograph, and also became the best-known ethnography of laboratory
practices (others that had been completed as dissertations in the late 1970s and/
or were initially published as articles came out as books some years later).7
In the emerging field of science and technology studies, these ethnographies
were often credited with showing that science is “constructed” all the way down
to the laboratory bench, and that scientific work is “messy” and “contingent,”
contrary to formal accounts written by philosophers and methodologists that
emphasize the certainty, purity, and rationality of scientific methods. This lesson
often was paired with injunctions to broaden the horizons of research to reach
beyond the laboratory, in order to show how science is thoroughly penetrated
by politics, inflected by gendered and cultural presuppositions, and infused
with colonial legacies. For the most part, there was little interest in delving more
deeply into the “mess” of laboratory practice, though numerous ethnographic
studies of science, technology, and medical practices have been undertaken in
the following decades.8
At this point, the apparent commensurability of laboratory ethnographies
with ethnomethodological studies of scientific work begins to break down.
A major sticking point is that Bloor, Collins, and others associated with the so-
ciology of scientific knowledge give credence to disciplinary sociology as a per-
spective and body of methods and concepts for discerning the central role of “the
social” in the sciences. Given their indifference toward disciplinary sociology as
a privileged vantage point, ethnomethodological studies of natural science are
reluctant to grant that sociological concepts, theories, and methods constitute
an adequate basis for investigating the nature and contents of the various nat-
ural sciences. For Garfinkel, each natural science is a distinctive science of prac-
tical actions—that is, of the practical actions particular to that science. This can
be understood to mean that practical actions and practical reasoning in the sci-
ences, no less than on city streets and in government offices, constitute relevant
social orders distinctively and irreducibly (Garfinkel et al. 1988; Garfinkel 2022).
Accordingly, an array of stable “social” variables does not exert influence on “sci-
ence,” as though from outside; instead, scientific practice is in its own right a dis-
tinctive site, and source, of social order.
Bruno Latour and Michel Callon took this point to heart when they developed
actor-network theory (Callon and Latour 1981; Latour 1987, 2005).9 However,
they eventually transformed the proposal that science and society are insepa-
rable in practice into an ontological postulate: a “second axis of symmetry” to
supplement Bloor’s first axis of symmetry between “true” and “false” belief. Like
the first axis, with its impartiality toward the validity or invalidity of a given be-
lief, the second axis was indifferent to conventional distinctions between human
and nonhuman entities, actions, causes, and influences; treating all identi-
ties and differences among society, politics, and nature as co-determined (co-
constructed, co-produced) nodes of action inscribed in and through continually
and unexpectedly shifting historical networks.
Ethnomethodologists did not follow actor-network theory’s incursions into
ever-expansive, heterogeneous networks of co-construction. Instead, Garfinkel
and his students pressed more intensively to examine and demonstrate the prac-
tical details that constituted technical work. The unique adequacy requirement
acted both as a constraint upon and an expression of that difference. It also
encouraged ethnomethodologists to take up a different mode of investigation
to that of ethnography—the method with which they were, and often still are,
closely identified.
The Unique Adequacy Requirement of Methods
Starting in the 1970s, Garfinkel’s published and unpublished writings increas-

ingly emphasized what he called “the unique adequacy requirement of methods.”
In part, this requirement radicalized a line of argument running from Max
Weber’s theoretical writings on social action, through Felix Kauffmann’s philo-
sophical writings on social science methodology, to Alfred Schutz’s social phe-
nomenology. According to the postulate of adequacy, a sociological description
of an observed action must take into account the actor’s point of view. When
one follows Wittgenstein’s (1958) treatment of understanding as a circumstan-
tial achievement in public discourse that does not rest ultimately on private
(first-person, “subjective”) experience, adequate understanding is demonstrated
through communicative action. An observer’s understanding of a given action
is thus grounded in public communicative actions rather than in attributions
of subjective motives and intentions. It also relates to the following argument
by Peter Winch (1958) on the difference between understanding physical
mechanisms and social regularities:
. . . it is quite mistaken in principle to compare the activity of a student of a form

of social behaviour with that of, say, an engineer studying the workings of a ma-
chine. . . . If we are going to compare the social student to an engineer, we shall
do better to compare him to an apprentice engineer who is studying what engi-
neering—that is, the activity of engineering—is all about. His understanding of
social phenomena is more like the engineer’s understanding of his colleagues’
activities than it is like the engineer’s understanding of the mechanical systems
which he studies. (1958:88)
Accordingly, an understanding of the engineer’s (or scientist’s, mathematician’s,

or musician’s) collective practice is developed in and through engagement in
that practice. In other words, the engineer is a “social student” who engages with
colleagues in understanding and contributing to the social organization of engi-
neering. By the same token, a sociologist who aims to understand such practices
adequately must go through an apprenticeship as a student-engineer.
In some respects, unique adequacy is akin to a familiar requirement for
anthropologists to immerse themselves in an exotic language and way of life
as a precondition for taking into account the “native” point of view. It also may
seem similar to the once-common practice among historians to use a profes-
sional background in a scientific field as a platform for doing history or phi-
losophy of science. However, unique adequacy is not simply an instrumental
requirement for gaining credible access to social or historical aspects of the
relevant practice. For ethnomethodological studies of work, the aim is to bring
the particular system of competency under systematic examination, as part of

its performance.
What, then, is involved in such a performative (or praxiological) effort to ex-
amine and analyze a distinctive competency? Perhaps the most familiar way of
doing this is to use ethnographic field notes, audio and video recordings, and
examples of texts and visual displays to analyze participants’ shop talk and
embodied work (e.g., Alac 2011; Burns 2001; Garfinkel et al. 1981; Goodwin
1995; Greiffenhagen and Sharrock 2019; Heath and vom Lehn 2008; Liberman
2013; Lynch 1985; Macbeth 1991; Rouncefield and Tolmie 2011). However,
Garfinkel suggested that “analytic ethnography” is not the only, or even the pre-
ferred, approach for studies of work in the sciences and professions. Instead,
he emphasized an approach that is demonstrative of “instructably reproduc-
ible phenomena” (Garfinkel (2022:25), citing Eric Livingston’s (1986) account of
proving mathematical theorems as an exemplar).10 Garfinkel asserted that an-
alytic ethnography does not and cannot aim to instruct readers on how to re-
produce the practices described. In contrast, Livingston’s lengthy account of
Gödel’s Proof walks the reader through the steps of the proof (though, judging
from this reader’s flagging effort, following the demonstration requires math-
ematical preparation that many readers are unlikely to have attained). Such a
praxiological demonstration does not aim to teach readers mathematics, or even
to convey an appreciation of it; instead, it aims to show (presumably to compe-
tent mathematicians) how a proof is composed through an artful use of mun-
dane practical actions, notational devices, standard figures and procedures, and
instructive communicative practices, many of which are taken for granted in
formal accounts of proofs. In that sense, Livingston’s account not only was a soci-
ological analysis of mathematicians’ work, but also was a contribution to mathe-
matics that demonstrated the substantive performance of the practice.
Livingston and others also make use of more accessible instances to demon-
strate particular practices: classical Euclidean proofs and Galilean experiments,
common board games, and other relatively simple exercises (Bjelic 1996, 2003;
Bjelic and Lynch 1992; Garfinkel 2002:Chapter 9; Liberman 2013; Livingston
1995, 2006; 2008). Such demonstrations are presented in textual accounts that
instruct readers on how to perform, recollect, puzzle over, and reflect upon el-
ementary mathematical, experimental, and other embodied practices. These
textual presentations invite readers to perform the activities, rather than simply
to read about them.11 The unique adequacy requirement is thus more than a
methodological prerequisite; it is realized through embodied performances of
demonstrations that exhibit their reflexive analyzability.
A fair question to ask about the unique adequacy requirement is what is so
unique about it? In the tradition of interpretive sociology, “the actor’s point of
view” is a limiting condition for organizing an observer’s account of what an
actor is doing, but it is not a straightjacket. Multiple, and even incommensurable,

interpretations are possible, and the author of an action does not necessarily
have the last word. Given this well-known fact about the multiplicity of possible
interpretations, why not simply speak of adequacy? In ordinary language, “ad-
equate” usually means acceptable, “good enough,” or “reasonable”—a flexible,
less-than-absolute standard. And, after all, artists disagree among themselves
about what counts as art, and scientists have fierce disputes about the scientific
status of particular theories, methods, and empirical claims. However, unique
adequacy is not a rigid standard of interpretation that assumes a single “correct”
understanding of a given practice. Instead, it involves a descriptive aim to expli-
cate just how competent practitioners perform a given practice in situ (Garfinkel
2002:175–76).
Naturally Organized Ordinary Activities
Studies of the sciences and professions have been the most visible product
of the studies of work program. However, while promoting that program,
Garfinkel (2002:257) also continued his ongoing studies of what he called “nat-
urally organized ordinary activities.” Such activities include commonplace
embodied activities, such as driving in traffic and producing order of service in
queues (e.g., Garfinkel and Livingston 2003), which are “naturally organized”
in the sense that they are produced by participants in the particular activity;
participants whose routine actions reflexively (though not necessarily “self-re-
flectively”) compose and react to the contingencies of a developing aggregate
order. Garfinkel did not draw a sharp distinction between ordinary activities
and the specialized work of laboratories, courtrooms, or mathematics lectures,
though it might seem that ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts
would have no need to worry about the unique adequacy requirement when
they study such routines as crossing the street at a busy intersection, forming
a service line at a ticket booth, or conversing over the phone. However, there is
a way in which that requirement still applies to studies of such commonplace
activities.
Despite the fact that no specialized training or credential is needed to witness
and perform ordinary actions, there still remains the problem of how to charac-
terize what participants in singular occasions of an activity are doing then and
there. Livingston (2008:246) provides a concise definition of this “characteriza-
tion problem” as “the attempt to characterize an activity, in its identifying lived
detail, as the recognizable work of its production.” He contrasts such an attempt
to the prerogatives of what he calls a “sociology of the hidden order”: an inter-
pretive program that falls back on general disciplinary knowledge (concepts,
models, theories, and formal analytic methods) to “discover” and characterize

“what is really going on.”
The characterization problem is akin to the problem of relevance in
descriptions of social action (Schütz 1970): given the indefinitely many pos-
sibilities for describing an action, how does the analyst settle for a particular
description? It also is related to the methodological issue of “thick description,”
derived from Gilbert Ryle’s (1971) critique of an imagined behavioral descrip-
tion that is unable to distinguish an inadvertent “blink” from a communica-
tively rich “wink.” The characterization problem is routinely bypassed in what
Garfinkel called “classic studies,” which he traces back to classical Greece, and
the Platonic distinction between the perspicacity of the sage and the blind-
ness of the masses. Such classic studies endow systematic uses of theory and
method with an ability to unmask popular myths and to upgrade common-
sense understandings into more rigorous and reliable knowledge. Garfinkel
proposed that ethnomethodology would eschew such privileged under-
standing, and by so doing would cut across the grain of Western intellectual
history by seeking order “in and as local work-site achievements of the most
ordinary organizational things in the world, in detail, for everything that the
organizational thing was really, actually, evidently; and in each instructably re-
producible phenomenon distinctively and uniquely, everything that detail and
the coherence of objects could possibly be” (Garfinkel et al. 1988:72; Garfinkel
2022:57; emphasis in original).
In line with the unique adequacy requirement, the aim in studies of nat-
urally organized ordinary activities is to recover and explicate endogenous
understandings, rather than to bypass or undercut them in favor of “scientific”
explanations. This requirement also has a parallel in conversation analysis, de-
spite its strong claims to the status of a science and its explicit formal-analytic
aims. As Harvey Sacks (1984:22) once suggested, ethnomethodology and con-
versation analysis make up a “domain of research” that is “not part of any other
established science.” Stating the matter with disarming simplicity, he noted that
this research domain “seeks to describe methods persons use in doing social
life” (Sacks 1984:22). Emanuel Schegloff also has made repeated reminders and
elaborations on this point. In one such elaboration, he says that for him, as a con-
versation analyst, the analytical aim is to understand:
. . . what the practices are by which participants produce some recognizable

action or actions at some moment, at some sequentially specifiable juncture
in the interaction, while engaged with some here-and-now characterizable co-
participants; and, complementarily, what the practices are by which they come
to recognize the action or actions being accomplished, the course of action
being launched, advanced, redirected, abandoned, etc. (Schegloff 2005:457)
Importantly, Schegloff articulates the proposal not as a professional ambition

but as a constraint on analysis which limits the prerogatives of academic social
science by “disciplining work to the indigenous preoccupations of the everyday
world being grasped, and serving as a buffer against the potential for academic
and theoretical imperialism which imposes intellectuals’ preoccupations on a
world without respect to their indigenous resonance” (Schegloff 1997:165). If it
is true that no other established social science pays heed to this constraint, it is
indeed a unique requirement for attaining adequacy in descriptions of human
conduct.
Studies of Work and Studies of Talk
Currently, there is limited interplay between studies of work in line with

Garfinkel’s initiatives and conversation analytic studies of institutional
talk: studies of discursive exchanges that constitute institutionalized procedures
such as courtroom interrogations, news interviews, debates, medical diagnoses,
calls to police dispatchers, and so on.12 Although both bodies of research typ-
ically make use of transcribed interchanges among practitioners in places of
work, and use them as exhibits of characteristic modes of practical action in the
specific workplace, there are evident differences in the analytical treatment of
such materials. The differences are highlighted, and perhaps exaggerated, in an
Appendix (titled “Postscript and Preface”) to an unpublished paper (Garfinkel
et al. 1988) that originally was drafted for inclusion in a volume, edited by Boden
and Zimmerman (1991), entitled Talk and Social Structure.13 Referring to the
thematic treatment of “talk” in that title, Garfinkel wrote that, in his studies of
work program, “talk is only one member in a company of objects. The title to
this volume leaves the impression that talk is the sine qua non of what ethno-
methodological interests could possibly be” (Garfinkel et al. 1988: 66; Garfinkel
2022:54). After listing topics of several studies by former students of his,
Garfinkel asserted: “Each of these studies is a study of talk, not however of the
functionalist talk at work, but of talk-in-and-as-of-work’s details* of a particular
profession or a particular science. In each case, material detail* of professionals’
talk inhabits the unspoken curriculum as a heavily consequential uniquely ad-
equate competence of their work lives”14 (Garfinkel et al. 1988:67; Garfinkel
2022:55). Several years later, in 1993, Garfinkel distributed a handout to
students in a graduate seminar titled “A Revision of the ‘Postscript and Preface’,”
part of which is reproduced in an editor’s note in Garfinkel (2022:53n1). In the
1993 handout he characterized ethnomethodology and CA as “incommensu-
rable” disciplines (for further elaboration on this point, see Button, Lynch, and
Sharrock [In press]).
In other words, Garfinkel was refusing to take previously characterized

structures of turn-taking, repair, and adjacency pair organization in ordinary
conversation as a foundation for characterizing workplace activities; activ-
ities that, of course, include social and material interactions. He was pointing
instead to the necessity to address, as orders in their own right, the embodied
and communicative practices that produce music, mathematical proofs, class-
room lessons, and so on. While the generic structures of discursive interaction
described in conversation analysis and sociolinguistics no doubt are part of such
activities (e.g., see Weeks 1996 on orchestra music), they are embedded in phe-
nomenal fields (Garfinkel and Livingston 2003), or topical contextures (Lynch
1991), that configure them as details in distinctive ensembles.
Garfinkel’s argument about conversation analysis is a variant of his “missing
what” polemic, since it suggests that formal structures of discursive interaction—
whether documented by verbal exchanges or multimedia exhibits—cannot ac-
count for the distinctive organizational, material, and scenic properties of the
work at hand. This is not, or not only, a matter of addressing nonverbal as well as
verbal interaction, but of “discovering” where the action occurs and elucidating
its thematic organization. Accordingly, talk- in-interaction, though ubiqui-
tous and certainly not to be ignored, is not necessarily the foundation of intel-
ligibility and organization (the “what”) of a given practice, such as conducting
measurements of complex superconducting compounds with a scanning tun-
neling microscope (Sormani 2015), or figuring out how to get “unstuck” in an
effort to solve a mathematical problem (Grieffenhagen and Sharrock 2011).
However, there is much more to the problem than one of finding an appropriate
way to analyze and present “the data.” In what is perhaps the most radical aspect
of his program, Garfinkel places ethnomethodology in a contingent relationship
with what counts as “data,” “models,” and “structures”—the form and salience of
such methodological resources would need to be discovered in and through en-
gagement with the particular methods used at a given worksite. Indeed, what the
work and its site might look like remain to be discovered.15
Instructed Actions
As noted earlier, Garfinkel’s proposal to address the “missing what” in particular

fields of practice requires a mastery that differs from what is taught in sociology
graduate programs. In each case, it is a competency with methods proper to the
particular fields being studied: “methods” for playing jazz piano (Sudnow 1978,
2001); “methods” for proving mathematical theorems (Livingston 1986); or
“methods” for conducting negotiations in a lawsuit (Burns 2001). For Garfinkel,
such mastery is not simply a prerequisite for understanding and writing
authoritatively about practices in a specialized domain: the key issue is that such
mastery is a condition for recognizing and exhibiting the competent production
of “social things.” Moreover, these “things” and the methodic practices that pro-
duce them are the very phenomena that are of central interest to classical soci-
ology, and yet paradoxically they are not accessible to sociology’s methods unless
and until those methods are supplemented, or even replaced, by other methods
that are integral to the practices studied. Except in the case of a reflexive investi-
gation of sociology’s standard methods, training in sociology could not possibly
prepare a student to investigate the routine production of other fields of practice
that also involve extensive training.
Garfinkel identified his conception of ethnomethodological “things” with
Durkheim’s injunction to consider social facts as things (Garfinkel 2002; Rawls
2002), but unlike Durkheim, he broadened his conception to include not
only collective social phenomena such as queues, traffic jams, and multiparty
conversations, but also the things that are central to other fields, such as legal
arguments, mathematical proofs, experimental practices, astrophysical discov-
eries, software programs, and so on. Above all, he did not follow Durkheim’s
(1982:63) effort to build a discipline with a specialized methodology that would
surpass lay “prenotions” with scientific knowledge.
The implications for ethnomethodology of Garfinkel’s stance toward
Durkheim’s Rules are not entirely clear (Lynch 2009, 2015). As Hutchinson,
Read, and Sharrock (2008:109) observe, “[t]‌here are at least two conflicting
ways in which ethnomethodologists can think of their inquiries,” both of which
are suggested, and to an extent exemplified, in Garfinkel’s (2002) treatment of
Durkheim. One is as the legitimate heir to Durkheim’s program, which is to
“think of ethnomethodology as a first step in the direction of a genuine social sci-
ence, [but] one which differentiates itself from sociology at large . . . in being the
only branch of sociology that addresses itself directly to actual and observable
occurrences in and of the social order” (Hutchinson et al. 2008:109). This would
be an alternative to existing sociology in the sense that it would get closer to the
“data” of actual social life than is possible through surveys, models, and other
formal-analytical methods. The other, which is much more in line my own un-
derstanding of Garfinkel’s program, is not to view ethnomethodology as a more
rigorous empirical sociology, but to view it as an alternate form of investigation
that shadows formal analysis wherever it is found, both within and beyond the
academy (see Button, Lynch, and Sharrock In press).
Formal analysis, in Garfinkel’s (2002) terms, includes but is not limited to
the various theories, methods, and analytic practices in sociology, all of which
attempt to develop robust generalizations about the organization and struc-
ture of social actions. It also includes more workaday phenomena such as plans
and rules, navigation maps and route directions, classroom pedagogies, and
recipes for countless activities. The ethnomethodological alternate is bound

up with how such formal analytical tools are composed and deployed in prac-
tice. Ethnomethodological investigations can be likened to efforts to delve
into tacit knowledge (Polanyi [1966] 2009), or to elucidate the grammar of
“knowing how” in contrast to “knowing that” (Ryle 1946), but they do not nec-
essarily confront a unitary domain; instead, Garfinkel’s “alternate” is bound up
with the specific formal devices with which it is paired in any given instance of
practical action.
Garfinkel used a changing array of “strange phrases” (Garfinkel et al.
1988: 68; Garfinkel 2022:56), or “strange names for new subjects” (Garfinkel
2007:15), to identify phenomena of interest, and ethnomethodology’s relation
to them: “instructed actions”; “Lebenswelt pairs”; “classic studies”; “constructive
analysis”; “formal analysis”; “signed object”; and “the rendering theorem” (also
see Garfinkel 2002:Chapters 4–5). He used some of these terms interchange-
ably, and he frequently used new terms and dropped others, perhaps in an ef-
fort to discourage students and other readers from reifying them into academic
concepts. The most readily understood of these “strange phrases” is “instructed
actions,” which, as the words imply, refers to cultivated actions that are subject
to instructions (akin, perhaps, to the German Bildung), and which also can have
instructive value for demonstrating how an action is done. Many activities make
use of written, diagrammatic, spoken, and other “formal” instructions, often in
combination; instructions that are specified in terms of rules, directions, maps,
and so forth (Lynch and Lindwall Forthcoming). Ethnomethodology’s task
would then be to find order in the complications: order in the concrete practices
of reading, following, and alternatively ignoring formal instructions; organ-
ized actions that endeavor to bring themselves reflexively under the jurisdic-
tion of the instructions, and which use scenic particulars as guides. Crucially,
ethnomethodology’s aim is not to deliver an improved formal analysis, but it is
instead to explicate the practices through which parties navigate through courses
of action. Accordingly, ethnomethodologists are not formal analysts—they do
not construct general models, theories, or other formal accounts of participants’
methods—they describe the pairing of formal analysis with singular practical
actions, and they presume that no expansion or elaboration of formal analysis
will be adequate for recovering what is achieved through that pairing.
Lebenswelt Pairs and Asymmetric Alternates
A couple of Garfinkel’s “strange phrases” articulate how formal instructions and

analyses are paired with what they instruct and/or analyze. One is “Lebenswelt
pairs” and the other is “asymmetric alternates.” The first phrase adopts the
phenomenological term for “life-world” (Husserl 1970): the lived-in world sen-
sually revealed and explored through embodied actions. The “pair” is made
up of a here-and-now activity together with an account that either (or both) is
deployed for guidance or produced as a “rendering” of that activity. There are
endless examples: a recipe and an attempt to enact it in a specific instance; a map
and a journey that attempts to follow it; a course of keyboard writing complete
with false starts and erasures, resulting in a written text as its residue; a conver-
sation and an audio or video recording of that conversation; a recording and a
transcript of it; a meeting and minutes of the meeting. It should be added that the
Lebenswelt covers both the here-and-now “experience” and any formal instruc-
tion or subsequent rendering of the action that is featured in a singular instance
of the action.
The second strange phrase—asymmetric alternates—is a claim about the re-
lationship between formal accounts and the lived practices of composing and
using them. As an illustration, consider the relationship between a sketch map
(or even a GPS) and the lived-work of following it from a point of origin to a
point of destination (Singh et al. 2019; Brown and Laurier 2012; Liberman 2013;
Psathas 1986). The map may be an indispensable guide for the journey, but it
cannot possibly anticipate or notate the contingencies that arise in the course
of reading it, getting lost, finding one’s way back “on” to the map, and so on. The
asymmetry has to do with how the map’s formal features provide a reduced and
rather inflexible account of the journey, whereas the journey subsumes the map
within a vast surplus of circumstantial, and largely gratuitous, detail. In the case
of a meeting and the recorded minutes, the vast amount of activity at the meeting
that is not recorded in the minutes cannot be recovered from the record, but the
record can be read in light of the meeting by those who attended it.
Gaps and Investigations
This simple pairing resonates with well-known organizational gaps: the gap
between formal accounts of methods and the performance of experiments; the
gap between managerial accounts and shop-floor practices; the gap between the
design of “intelligent” tools and the practices of using them; the gap between
law school curricula and the work of trying a case in court. Lucy Suchman’s
(1987) Plans and Situated Actions effectively developed the instructed action
paradigm into an entire research program at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC), which has taken hold in other corporate research centers, and in the
academic field of communication and information science. Suchman’s project
had both critical-theoretical and practical-empirical aspects. The criticism
took aim at the privileging of abstract plans, not only in the management of
organizational affairs but also throughout cognitive science, for operational-
izing practical action and practical reasoning. The practical aspect made up
a research program for conducting detailed ethnographic and conversation
analytic research at the site of work activities. Workplace and work practice
studies, as they came to be called, described practical and interactional con-
tingencies that elude formal design and management. Such research contrib-
uted to—indeed, it helped form—the field of computer-supported cooperative
work (CSCW), in which practitioners collaborate with ethnographers to inves-
tigate practical actions and interactions among designers at work, and among
users and various computational devices in different organizational and prac-
tical environments.
When focused on sociological methods and other formal analytical programs,
Garfinkel’s alternate can seem to take on a distinctively subversive character.
However, Garfinkel denies being critical of social science methods, because
the ad hoc performance of such methods is far from unusual as an instance of
instructed actions, and the analytical stance he takes toward the gap between
social science methods and practices is no different from the one he takes to-
ward the (often aggravating) difference between, for example, the instructions
for assembling a bicycle rack and an arduous and clumsy effort to mount the
rack on the back of a particular automobile. However, a sense of criticism arises
from an incongruity between the situated performance of research and the wide-
spread presumption in the social sciences that rigorous procedures should ad-
here strictly to methodological protocols.16
Conclusion: What Became of Studies of Work?
Garfinkel anticipated that ethnomethodological studies of work would be

difficult to situate within the social sciences, and he expressed the hope that
such studies would find places in other fields. His hope was that such studies
would constitute “hybrids” with the practices studied: that they would be of
interest to scientists, mathematicians, physicians, lawyers, musicians, and
so forth (Garfinkel 2002:100). To some extent, this hope was realized. David
Sudnow provided an example when he resigned a tenured academic post in
the 1970s and attempted (with some success) to develop a distinctive peda-
gogy for piano playing. Garfinkel’s students Eric Livingston and Stacy Burns
undertook advanced training in mathematics and law, respectively, to pursue
their ethnomethodological investigations of practices in those fields. However,
they did not entirely “go native” (nor did Sudnow entirely drop his academic
connections), and their research remains situated, however uneasily, within ac-
ademic sociology.
Perhaps the most robust environment for hybrid studies has been in the field
of CSCW, a field that was given a major boost by the reception to Suchman’s and
others’ ethnographic studies at Xerox PARC and at other private-sector research
centers where ethnographers, often in collaboration with programmers and
other technically proficient staff, examined technology design and use. Unlike
academic sociology, in which such a close attention to detailed technical practice
is often dismissed as too “micro” to be of interest, in such environments a deep
understanding of praxiological organization is a crucial part of the productive
enterprise. The place of ethnomethodology in CSCW and related fields is not
assured, however, as it vies with other social science programs to sustain its dis-
tinctive initiatives, and workplace studies often take a more eclectic form than
Garfinkel was willing to countenance (see Button et al. 2015 for a critical provo-
cation on this point).
At present, Garfinkel’s design for studies of work remains only partly fulfilled,
and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis for the most part have de-
veloped, and continue to develop, in a way that he critically and ambivalently
contrasted with the program he envisaged (see Button, Lynch, and Sharrock In
press: Chapter 7). He was all too aware of this prospect, and attributed it to the
professional academic circumstances under which he and his students oper-
ated. So, for example, he noted that his “dissatisfactions” with analytical eth-
nographies of science were the flip side of their “virtues”; their virtues being
that they tie “into, while developing further, current science studies of experi-
mental practices” in the field of science and technology studies (Garfinkel et al.
1988:118n10; Garfinkel 2022:83n10). The same can be said of studies that tie
into, and contribute to, literatures in fields such as communication and infor-
mation studies, criminology and legal studies, medical sociology, and so on.
Nevertheless, while his initiatives have not been fully developed, they are fre-
quently invoked, partly taken up, and to an extent exemplified by work in an
array of fields within and beyond sociology.
Garfinkel’s proposal for studies of work expresses a radical insight that the
professional social sciences are constitutionally inclined to reject, but which is
likely to haunt their disciplinary programs for years to come. The insight is that
the methodic production and analysis of sociology’s substance, as a practical
matter, is everybody’s business. Accordingly, the work of elucidating this me-
thodic production is not done by following any of the established social science
methods, whether qualitative or quantitative. Understanding this point can lead
one to appreciate both the radical novelty of Garfinkel’s program and its failure
to catch on in any particular social science discipline, except in an occasional and
fugitive way.
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PART II
E MPIR IC A L IM PAC T
5
Sources of Issues and Ways of Working
An Introduction to the Study of Naturally Organized
Ordinary Activities*
Harold Garfinkel
“Naturally organized phenomena” and “naturally organized activities” are

borrowed directly from Harvey Sacks—at my request for advice on what the
work that we have been doing fairly consists of or fairly can be said to consist
of and should consist of. He spoke of his own work as the study of naturally or-
ganized activity. The presence of the studies of Sacks, Schegloff, Moerman, and
Jefferson and their coworkers, and their proposal to speak of what they have been
studying in those certain terms and, by reason of their large corpus of studies, in
established terms, sets up and makes secure the thematic proposal of this paper.
I offer it as the following claim.
If the studies done since 1967 by Sacks, Schegloff and Garfinkel are used as
a point of view from which to review almost two decades of work by ethno
methodologists, that work can be understood to have been working out the
discovery of a new phenomenon: naturally organized ordinary activities. An ex-
tensive corpus of empirical studies of practical action describe in detail a consid-
erable variety of these naturally organized activities. That the studies were done
under the developing auspices of a corpus that they became parts of is critical.
That the studies are assessable under the auspices of a corpus and that they are
done increasingly under its auspices provide[s]‌them a structure of inquiry. The
corpus as structure of inquiry assures access to a vast domain of organizational
phenomena that were unknown and unsuspected until these studies established
their existence and provided the methods to study them.
My purpose in this paper is to explicate that claim. Several steps in an argu-
ment compose that claim and demonstrate it. I have chosen to provide for that
development by first presenting a detailed précis. Even if we don’t complete the
argument, there will be in hand the sense: this much was covered; that much was
touched on, and some remains. I hope to borrow on that structure to deal with
the discussion.
*For an explanation about the origins of this chapter, see the Editors’ Note at the end of this chapter, pp. 159–60.

The steps of the argument are these. I want first to introduce to you the
“Missing Interactional What” of organizational objects. In order to justify the
claim of ethnomethodology’s discovery of naturally organized ordinary activi-
ties and to produce the claim to specifications, I shall need to demonstrate that
the Interactional What is essentially missing from lay and professional organiza-
tional studies and to provide for the Missing What as a technical phenomenon.
These are the technical aims of the paper’s arguments.
With the phenomena having been provisionally identified, three sources of
studies of that Missing What will be described: (l) the Missing What as it is avail-
able in “case materials” and ethnographic reportage; (2) the Missing What via
the analysis of Organizational Items; and (3) the Missing What in that it consists
of the practical objectivity and practical visibility of several systems of naturally
organized phenomena. Each source in ways particular to it, in its singular ways,
provides for issues of structures of social activities. However, the seriousness and
consequentiality of the claimed discovery turn on (3); and with it the strange,
discoverable, unsuspected and consequential thing structure is in practical
actions. These topics will be followed with (4) a summary.
1. The “Interactional What”: It Is a Technical Phenomenon
Last January Harvey Sacks and I spent the day discussing an outlined manual
of studies that I asked him to criticize. He discussed at length a curiosity in the
history of work in the social sciences. He spoke of the absence of interactional
studies in professional studies of organization. His question was simple: How
could it be that bureaucracies, for example, would have been studied to such
depth of effort, care, and money and nevertheless that thing would have been
missed that ethnomethodologists are addressed to and are picking up endlessly
and on every side, to the point that whatever else might happen to our enterprise
it looks like we couldn’t be wrong on having picked up the presence in the world
of those interactional events. Sacks has this way of indicating the formidable
presence of interaction. He is doing this to indicate the massive endless business
of looking, nodding, shaking and the rest of it that makes itself present to anal-
ysis and demands our interest. Speaking past the suggestion with its use, several
observations make specific what Sacks is talking about.
(i) The omnipresence in all societies of accountable organizations of com-

monplace activities in our society, families, faculties, traffic, welfare agencies,
manufacturing plants, banks, national government or street gangs.
(ii) The existence of endlessly many inquiries and in these endlessly many
inquiries the circumstantially embodied, interactional just- so and
Sources of Issues and Ways of Working 143
just-
what of ordinary activities remains, for all practical purposes,
ignored, unknown, unsuspected, and unmissed as technical phenomena.
(iii) Taken together, (i) and (ii) compose a technical phenomenon. It is a
discoverable phenomenon—a discoverable phenomenon and not im-
aginable. It has been discovered in various activities and is being dis-
covered. It is consequential. And it is criterial. The phenomenon is
this: the essential, acknowledged, used, ignored relevance to the collab-
orated production of the structures of commonplace activities of the
circumstantial, embodied, interactional, just-so and-just-what of those
ordinary activities. That is what I take to be, at least if I need to put it
into a few slogans, we will call that the Missing What. Caution: That
statement is about the Missing What, about the Missing What in the
same way that an extensive list of studies exists, none of it reporting
(describing) the structures of practical action but composed instead
of studies about ethnomethodology, or studies about conversational
analysis. It is loose preparatory talk designed to convey transient
convictions of coherence and comprehensiveness but to be abandoned
at the first whiff of the world.
One further remark. The Missing What is not such as to make ordinary activi-
ties concrete. That is a prevailing notion. Instead, it consists of unavoidably jury
deliberations, of unavoidably searching for lost keys, of unavoidably improvised
jazz, or eligibility interviews, or kung-fu instruction, or Kpelle secrecy.
The interactional what of conversation’s activities is for the local production
cohort of conversationalists hopelessly “sensible,” unavoidably and without
remedy understood. The missing what provides, too, an unavoidable, irreme-
diable relevance to the local production cohort’s arts and sciences of practical
action, even while it remains ignored by these arts and sciences, unknown, and
unmissed as technical phenomena.
2. The Missing What Is Provisionally Identified in “Case

Materials” and Ethnographic Reportage
This Missing What can be provisionally identified with some “case materials,”
concluding with observations about ethnography: 1. Dave Sudnow’s observations
re: Howard Becker’s articles on jazz musicians; 2. The strange and recurrent prac-
tical fault of manuals of instruction that they omit exactly and delicately what
the novice most needs to know; 3. Traffic engineers’ analysis of context-specific
features of traffic streams; 4. Ethnographic reportage.
l. Sudnow on Working Jazz Musicians
Dave Sudnow, a jazz musician, on the basis of his studies of improvised jazz,1
called to my attention what he called the Howard Becker phenomena in the
sociological study of jazz.2 Becker’s studies he says can be read to learn about
jazz musicians, where they work, who they work with, what they earn, or how
they get their “gigs”; in the place where they are playing that there is an au-
dience, what the audience will request of them, and so on. But, says Sudnow,
nowhere in the articles can it be read, and no interrogation of the articles will
supply that in just those places, just those persons, with just who is there, and
at just that time, under the circumstances at hand, must in and as local work
make music together. Sudnow points to a curiosity of the reportage: The ar-
ticles omit entirely and exactly what the parties are doing that makes of what
they are doing for each other recognizably the just this, just so and just what
is going on, making music of a certain sort, and not in any which way, but in
the certain local, witnessed ways of musicians’ practices. That is omitted. It
cannot be recovered from the account. Instead the article provides the work
of the jazz musicians as something describable, but describable after, or in the
way, it has been disengaged from the occasion in which that work is done, and
is no longer referable to that work or needs to be or can be answerable to that
work to find its sense particularly.
The account construes that work according to an analytical contention of
that work as an occupation: where they play, whom they play with, what they
play, who is in the audience, how much they will get paid for it, how they ar-
range for jobs, and so on—all these gathered, written, understood, occupation-
ally relevant matters would be provided for. Throughout the text and wherever
occupationally relevant matters are provided for there, then just there in the
text at exactly and in just that place will be an omission. And because the omis-
sion is stable for those places it is a standing omission. The standing omis-
sion has to do with what those musicians in each other’s company in the place
where they are playing music together are doing to make of what they are
doing witnessably jazz music. The absence of descriptive/instructive literature
on musicians’ praxis is a complete absence, and is generalizable. A descrip-
tive/instructive literature can’t be found for occupational practices of any sort.
Instead in endless discussions and descriptions, work is handled in familiar
vernacular terms, arranged with the use of descriptive devices of the dictionary
of occupational titles. They provide a resemblance, a simulacrum of the situ-
ated organization of activities. They render accountable effective practices in a
sense of structure.
The thing that is marvelous about analytical sociology’s descriptions and

Everett Hughes’s works, for example, of which Becker’s work is a continuation,
is that it makes the structures of ordinary affairs accessible in the fashion of
their natural availability: “My God! Look at all the beautiful stuff that they can
now see going on, and it is just there waiting for me.” You would like to say with
respect to the description that it can be examined about the definite things that
it provides for, and thereby as well the definite things that it does not provide
for—things it provides for as specifically absent, and notably absent. It says this
and just this and not that. But when you try and read it in that way you find you
are swamped in vagueness. No sooner do you begin to tie down the procedures
that he used or must have used to have come to the description of that sort,
then you can’t find him or his procedures in the world. Further, your students
are swarming on you, demanding “What about it? Can’t we do it better than
that? Can’t we get a better procedure? Let’s see, maybe somebody has something
in mind for surveys.” Or there might be a way of, say, of formulating questions
such that their uniform formatting and administration will assure the ade-
quacy of what can be said afterwards as having been found out as answers to
the questions. And so on and so on. All these variations preserve the vagueness.
It’s more than the vagueness. It is an irremediable vagueness. It is the vagueness
that accompanies the user’s own competence as a talker—not of the language—
but a talker in those places where talk of a certain kind must be done, then and
there, amongst us, and so on and so on.
2. Manuals
A descriptive literature on occupational praxis is absent to the entire field of

the sociology of occupations. It is nowhere to be found, not even in manuals.
Manuals have the peculiar property that they are occasioned descriptions. They
are occasioned particularly to established institutions of instructors and novices.
It is not that they are simply manuals as if manuals were, in the world, something
generally speaking. You can’t find such manuals. But you can find about them
that they lend themselves to such a reading. Claims can be made under a reading
that they exhibit “features of universalistic interpretation.” Yet, that universalistic
interpretation is an occasioned property. You have to know what you are doing
to read it, to find that the stuff that is provided for a collection of instructions
is context-free. That is a tremendous achievement in the reading. And it is not
done any which way.3 What devices make up the work of reading, and writing a
manual of instructions?
3. Traffic Engineers on Context-Specific Features

of Traffic Streams
Traffic engineers have collections of policies and methods with which to specify
definitive structures of apparently ordinary activities of traffic streams. Their
studies are preoccupied with these events as self-producing, self-explicating phe-
nomena. By structures they understand activities, circumstances, movements,
reasoning, etc., in that according to drivers methods, (a) they exhibit the prop-
erties of uniformity, reproducibility, repetitiveness, standardization, typicality,
stability, direction, relevance, and so on; (b) these properties are independent of
local production cohorts of drivers; (c) local production cohort independence
is a phenomenon for drivers’ (members’) recognition; and (d) the phenomena
(a), (b) and (c) are every local production cohort’s practical, circumstantial
accomplishment.
Several years ago I began to study context-specific features of traffic streams
because of the promising and deep problems they pose. One of these: instead of
models for events of traffic streams being devices for analyzing these phenomena,
the models owe their cogency, consistency, perspicuity, and every other beautiful
logical property to the matters of that and how they are constituent parts of the
phenomena they analyze. We began to collect and analyze videotaped photo-
graphic materials of traffic stream events from the point of view of the driving.
These materials were examined for the purpose of deciding and documenting
the feasibility and consequences of formulating, with their use, an alternative
policy to the policies of constructive analysis that prevail when context-specific
events of traffic streams are analyzed by traffic engineers.
We thought of the problems to be solved as follows. When prevailing policies
are used to describe and explain traffic streams the task is done by formulating
driver-witnessable activities as ideal accounts of “actual activities like these.”
Customarily a mathematical analysis of the ideal is carried out to provide prop-
erties of the ideal. These are then assigned to the actual driving practices. That
is, it is implicitly assumed that these mathematically derived properties are ex-
istent in the actual driving practices and recommendations for the alterations of
driving environment, and driving practices are imagined and justified in terms
of these ideal properties.
Almost all traffic researchers analyze context-specific properties in this way.
Well known successes accompany that policy. Well known, but little understood
embarrassments accompany it, too. Several may be mentioned.
(i) Elegant theories of traffic flow are accompanied by a mosaic of ad hoc

empirical descriptions. Relative to this corpus, driver- witnessable
events of traffic flow, although they are intractably “vague,” nevertheless
accompany ideal accounts as unassimilable but indispensable reportage.

In this procedure one must already know with others what he can be
talking about in order to demonstrate structures, and news from no-
where is a characteristic research result.
(ii) The skilled work that drivers are doing somehow produces the analyzable
features of traffic flow to satisfy the requirements of model formulations
and their mathematical analysis. But this work escapes understanding in
explicit, accurate, and deep analytical details.
(iii) An enormous literature on selective attention permits only crude and
unsatisfactory transfer of this experience to the deep analysis of traffic
events despite the obvious (natural) intuitive relevance of engineering
experience with accident prevention, design of freeway signs, etc.
(iv) Some context-specific properties of the events of traffic flow are obstinately
intractable to prevailing policies though they nevertheless remain ines-
capable from the point of view of in situ driving. Some examples are: (a)
the essentially variable figure-ground functions of driver-witnessable
traffic displays; (b) the constancies of estimated safety distances, speeds,
driver purposes, etc. relative to the endless changes of the traffic streams
displays; or (c) the essential relevance of “context” to the driver in that his
trip which comes “in the long run” to satisfy the rules that describe it—
those of the traffic engineer, the police, his own, etc. must be done “over
the road,” “just-here and just-now,” and “in detail.”
We found that a basic problem confronts traffic research. That problem is to de-
scribe (a) the flow and (b) how the flow “got that way.” Describing the flow is
accomplishable with the aid of various kinds of recording devices that are usually
placed outside the flow. Describing how the flow got that way has not yet been
satisfactorily accomplished. It is the hope of most traffic engineers that (b) is re-
coverable from (a). Thus they invent models that answer (b) and reproduce (a).
However, the problem immediately arises that there are many models that an-
swer (b) and reproduce (a) which are incompatible with each other. Thus, having
the property of “answering (b) reproducing (a)” is not sufficient to guarantee that
a model explains how the flow “got that way.”
We propose to analyze the flow from inside the flow, and in doing so to answer
(b). From our answer of (b) we will then recover (a). Since our answer of (b) will
actually be generated from the flow—as opposed to being invented to answer
(b)—we feel confident that the properties that we describe will actually exist in
the flow, i.e., that they are findable. However, we are presented with the task of
recovering the properties of the flow as an entity from observations made by a
part of the flow. To carry out this analysis it is required that we describe the phe-
nomena of local production cohorts and their properties.4
4. Providing for the Missing What

with Ethnographic Reportage
In much previous work of ethnomethodologists, ethnographic reportage has

supplied the studies of the Missing What. This is notably so in the early work
of ethnomethodologists. It is possible to reread that literature for what it could
have been up to as that; and indeed for the seriousness of present enterprises
it was up to that. In fact there is hardly any alternative in the early work. In
Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) those that are or can be read as
empirical studies in any interesting sense of empirical are doing that. They don’t
amount to more than that. It is quite a lot to come to, but they don’t come to
more than that. With regard to the social structures of everyday activities as prac-
tical accomplishments, which is a phenomenon of phenomena for both ana-
lytic sociology and ethnomethodology, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel
1967) provides materials with which to find, formulate, specify, elaborate, topi-
calize etc. as a researchable issue the natural availability of the practices of prac-
tical organizational reasoning.
Some examples: The study of the practices of following coding instructions,
I take it now is to be understood as having described coders’ work, ethnograph-
ically speaking, whereby the contents of a folder were rewritten into a coding
sheet in such a fashion that coders would be able to meet occupational demands
that they had followed a manual of coding rules; satisfactory compliance with
these specified a methodic procedure in doing the rewriting. That that was
done with the use of practices of “etcetera,” “unless,” and the like is understood
ethnographically.
Agnes was reported to have used an environment of natural normal males-
females as a device with which to manage the work as a part of that environment,
of claiming and securing her rights in the company of natural normal males and
females to be treated as a natural, normal female. Other such investigations: the
work of decision making in common sense situations of choice (jurors; teams
at the Suicide Prevention Center doing psychological autopsies); the use of the
“documentary method of interpretation” in lay and professional fact finding,
psychiatric diagnosis and counseling, interrogation procedures, designing
and administering survey “instruments,” etc. The discussions by Sacks and me
(Garfinkel and Sacks 1970) of glossing as a way of speaking plain English, of
formulations, and Richard’s gloss are also to be understood and can be seen to
consist of treating that missing what with ethnographic reportage.
The Missing What, studied and provided for as reportage, has provided at-
tractive properties. For example, the properties of decision-making in common
sense situation of choice have done yeoman service. They provided the basis
for grant proposals that got money. They have been used endlessly in practical
situations to persuade people to the view that this kind of work is worth some-
thing; that it has a currency. It is possible to hear in it that it deals with recogniz-
able persons in real affairs. For teaching I can recommend them. They are easy
stuff. Particularly where novices are concerned they permit you to start with fa-
miliar territory and to move around in it.
There are also grounds for dissatisfaction. The practices of practical action and
practical reasoning—reported as the work of coders, of juror’s deliberations, the
investigations of suicidal deaths at the Suicide Prevention Center—are “naturally
available”: they are recognized by members; they are recognized by members
to be unavoidable; members recognize them as well to be unavoidable, and
members recognize them as storyable practices—practices that are available to
them for the telling. They are available through and by reason of the mastery of
natural language, which is to say, they are ethnographically available. Finally, the
natural availability is itself a phenomenon for members. The availability of that
recognition together with the willingness and the ability to use the recognition
for further inquiries turns on the mastery of a certain practiced way of speaking
among us. I am not talking only of professional shoptalk. Then telling these prop-
erties elicit certifying remarks like, “Yeah, I know what you are talking about.
I have seen that. It happened to a cousin of mine that. . . .” And all the rest of this
stuff that composes the recognition as a usable thing.
Although ethnography can deal with the missing what, it does so in the pe-
culiar fashion in which persons, who know what the ethnographer is talking
about, can hear him talking about just that, and can talk about the matter in a
similar manner. Talking-amongst-us is the heart of it. When the talking gets
done, whether it is done in the writing, the teaching, or the storytelling, it doesn’t
provide for the kind of “technical instruments” that are prevalent or make up
the art of talk. Instead, it uses naturally the arts of talk, and lets it go for the time
being what that instrument might consist of until the issue “matures.” Where
the arts of writing, of being able to write in formatted fashion from beginning
to end, displaying a step-wise, developing course via appropriate connectives,
via thus-es, and-it-followed-thens, narrative markers and the rest—these can be
used to make cogent, clear, credible, deliverable, plausible, questionable, all the
beautiful things that need to be claimed on behalf of the thing talked about, even
that one is speaking in a referentially appropriate way (which is itself an enor-
mous achievement). All that can be done between us. Parties to that enterprise,
like professional sociologists, end up reading the stuff on documentary method
as if it was interpreted to catch as a way of working the word of street interviews
and survey procedures. Persons who had any experience with that work would
say things like, “that sounds pretty good,” “it sounds right,” “in my own case it
happened that. . . .” You get into exchanges of experience like that; of “trading up’ ”
recognized topics to establish the facts of life.
These are grounds for dissatisfaction where issues of the circumstantial rel-
evance of structure, the circumstantial production—the embodied produc-
tion of structure of service lines are contingent achievements, problematic to
queues, or to the embodied production of the structures of turn taking, or to
the use of manuals, manuals, maps, etc.5—assure that the studies of structure
are defeated if the missing what is grounded in ethnography. Studies of the
missing what grounded in ethnography are essentially unable to encounter ad-
dress, formulate, or settle issues of structure. Where issues of the situated and
circumstantial production of structures are of interest, in that and in the ways
ethnomethodologically speaking that their circumstantial production is prob-
lematic, the study of structure is defeated when the missing what is grounded in
ethnographic reportage. Characteristically attempts to provide the missing what
via ethnographic reportage occur in the work of novices, in the work of persons
who are self-taught in ethnomethodology, in the work of those who seek to do
ethnomethodological studies of the structures of practical reasoning and prac-
tical action but avoid each in its own ways, or remain indifferent to the work
of conversational analysis, gives causes for complaint or dissatisfaction where
ethnomethodologists’ studies of structure are of interest.
Not all the work of ethnomethodologists, however, is of that sort.
A contrasting treatment of the missing what consists of a compendium of
(singular or particular) closely analyzed organizational objects. The work of
Sacks and Schegloff and their coworkers on the events of conversation provide
an immense corpus of such object events. But there is the work of others too.
Cicourel’s6 studies of lay and professional practices in assembling and analyzing
rates make up part of this compendium of organizational objects. Recently,
I have been examining “formatting” in queues,7 by which I mean that person[s]‌
in the way in which they are positioned with respect to a serving function can
display by their positioning the presence to persons in the queue of an order
of service that is itself available to queuers in all of the events, features that
the order of service can be said fairly to compose, but which requires for the
practical objectivity and visibility of its features one’s motivated, committed,
or interested presence to the same order of service as a member of the line.
The phenomena of formatting in queues include among the queue’s practical
objectivity and observability for queuers’ accountable features the presence
of reckoning procedures which are “parts” of the queue in the way that any
other features are parts of the queues, but are available to the members, for
which the line itself, in the kind of ordering activity it consists of, provides
for the full array of its members as worldly things in-of-and-as the system that
“incorporates” them, that “includes” them, or that “gathers” them. To explicate
those terms you are required to go into the queue to find how they are being
made out for the “accountable character” of its own activities and features.
These materials are not presented as faults to be remedied; or as ironies for

science, philosophy, the practical arts, etc. They are not anomalies via-à-vis a sci-
entific paradigm (à la Kuhn); they are not data calling for deviant case analysis.8
Instead, each of the different case materials has its particular lessons to teach on
the phenomena regarding the Missing What as researchables.
3. “Organizational Items” Are Another Source of the

Missing What
Ethnomethodological studies are not restricted to case studies or ethnographic

reportage. A contrasting treatment of the missing what consists of the common
properties of a compendium of singular and carefully analyzed items of organi-
zational activity. There is the relevance for Organizational Items as a source of the
Missing What of a particular procedure for finding and analyzing them. Where
studies of Organizational Items are concerned the strongest cases that ground
the claims of technical procedure are found in the work of Sacks, Schegloff and
their coworkers. The procedure consists of:
(1) Finding, collecting and analyzing organizational items, in, of, and as
various enterprises of ordinary activities. Greetings-in-of-and-as con-
versational activity is an organizational item. Story-telling, topicality, or
turn-taking in, of, and as conversational activity are other organizational
items, as are place in line, place holding, waiting, or place reckoning in, of,
and as queues.
(2) An enterprise’s Organizational Items are then gathered as an “Activity.”
The gathering is critical. I refer to gathering in the active way in which
an Item having been possibly discovered, immediately sets up the rele-
vance of it to Items to which it beckons and is beckoned for its relevancies
and “companionability.” That they are gathered into an Activity means
that they are increasingly justifiable as elucidations of their coherent or-
ganization, of their coherent course. It is not that conversation stands
independent of and indifferent to, and, as a rich resource is endlessly
available to inquiries that learn this and that about it so that an amount
of ignorance is transferred from one mound to the other. An ordering of
Organizational Items is itself unavoidably a discoverable matter. In its dis-
covery—in the developing discovery—it reveals the work which is hidden
in the character of the activities that originally beckoned the inquiry. So
the claim that one has provided for the turn-taking organization of con-
versational activity comes only after long and arduous investigation into
conversations’ Organizational Items, and not conversations generally
speaking, not as comprehensive analysis, not conversations in vernac-

ular and established terms for finding and understanding conversational
events but as the results of a closely examined, technical analytic enter-
prise of a certain sort.
(3) Order in the enterprises’ Organizational Items (i.e., “the activity”)
becomes increasingly “strong” as inquiries because, but only because they
actually (not otherwise) in discovering some, are able to discover others.
(4) It is critical that we come to know the technical character of an
Organizational Item as a way of bringing it under examination. There
is no way of getting to these materials unless they become progressively
“known” except as an issue of conversational activity. Rather the methods
must themselves consist of the discovered conversationalists’ specific
knowledgeable work, and therein technical work, whereby the object of
that conversational activity are known in the fashion of the Activity’s own
production. What do they have in common?
(i) Recognizer has a vulgar competence. Greetings, for example, are un-
wittingly available and thus enable the observer to do what he/she
is doing unwittingly. Another example: There is no “beginning” to
the entering of the freeway—it doesn’t stop for you to enter—but
you have to join an ongoing thing. How one “enters the rush” makes
available those ongoing features of the freeway in the local cohort.
With presence of freeway or greetings activities one finds a massive,
organized systematic objective character of activity. It’s there in un-
suspected ways except for local arrangements that bring it forth.
(ii) Objectivity is massively there. Beginning a search to find these
Objects (objectivity) has no beginning. Under the mundane attitude
you already begin with the thing standing there. The thing stands
with its presence. Its features are local, hidden, systematic. Greeting
is there in its massive character—it’s there hidden, systematic, in a
peculiar sense. It is unsuspected except under local arrangements.
It’s not that we are peeking through a keyhole. Indeed, we have
to make a special effort to get access to greetings by providing for
those things that can be accessed only by “peeking at them”—say by
denying our own presence to the thing that announces itself: that we
look without being looked back at. Or we look while making believe
that the thing we are looking at is none of our doing. We look while
making believe that it’s an operation of registration of the spectacle
of the world. Questions of recognition are elaboratable by the use
of that analytic machinery. Whereas when we find the greeting we
are already old friends. Indeed, we find them as old friends. We
find them complete with their familiar ordinary, just-so just-what
character. If we have questions about them, our questions take their

motives from the kind of things that presence is for us, and there-
fore for whatever that presence could consist of. In the multitudi-
nous things it could consists of, it assures the multitudinous things
that greetings could consist of. Therefore it is pointless to look for a
uniform method to treat greetings as if greetings by the uniformity
of the treatment we would give them are thereby assured that they
are (objectively) alike, and observably so, that is that they are observ-
ably alike.
(iii) Accountability is there but watch for reflexivity. It is in the way of
conversation’s own competent practices, of its own work that its
phenomena are hidden— i.e., that they are specifically unavail-
able to a conversation’s own formulations of its course, its parties,
its origins, its topics, their “meanings,” its nature. A conversation’s
own vernacular versions of itself as a worldly event as conversa-
tion, misconceives its worldly properties as organized phenomena.
We can generalize that proposal to the claim that analytic sociology
misconceives its own work as organized practices. So, for these phe-
nomena hidden consists of being present and unminded—being
present but specifically unmentioned and unmentionable, specifically
unnoticed and unnoticeable—of being in its presence a normally
thoughtless presence. They are not imaginable. Sacks insists and his
work shows that they are not imaginable. Imagining their features
will find you only imagined features.
4. The Missing What with Respect to the Great Issues of

Their Objectivity and Their Observability
(l) With respect to issues (i.e., phenomena that call for further description/
instruction) of their objectivity and observability that are collected in and
posed by the properties of the social facticities, if there are things in the
world like greetings in conversation, then the matters that Sacks and com-
pany have been describing are greetings in conversation. The first thing
that we come upon is not a way to begin, but a way in which, as a worldly
beginning we find ourselves in the midst of and in easy and ordinary rec-
ognition of the worldly events: greetings. Not greetings as worldly events;
not greetings whose presence poses questions of their worldliness, but
worldly events, greetings—greetings in-of-and-as-the world. I don’t find
greetings in the world: I find greetings. Better: when I listen to the tape, I
hear the exchange of greetings.
We do not begin by withdrawing from the familiar access to greetings in con-

versation in order thereby to find what might lie behind them. Instead we en-
counter the greeting each for himself, we encounter the greetings on behalf of
Anyman. We encounter them as worldly things in their embodied presence.
When we find them in the world we find our presence to them.
(2) I use the terms “systematic” or “system-specificity” to tag a second collec-

tion of properties. (a) It is to the local course of the conversation’s work as
of which a conversation’s features are accountably sensible, factual, objec-
tive, or caused, which is to say as of which its features are observable and
(analyzable) (reportable). (b) Features are materially particular. They are
provided for in their full material contents by the way in which they are
“parts” of the course of action as of which being “done” they are “done.”
(c) Conversation’s features, queueing activities, play-in-games, are “built”
and elucidated as occasioned structures of activity. Those occasioned
structures provide for the presence and sensibility of all the topics of
logic and methodology, which are provided for as phenomena. In light
of the system-specific properties of organizational objects the claim is
made that all the topics of logic and methodology are to be rediscovered,
and without any thought for corrective enterprises with respect to what
these issues could consist of, unless issues of what things are observability
and what things are objectivity are sacrifices to something else, like, we
could simply imagine them or we could operate with received doctrine to
specify such issues, or paraphrase favorite philosophers. We could even
speak on behalf of things so far known as the “facts of such cases.” But
without technical access to the facts of the case, we would not know how
much issues are encountered in situ. Their occasioned production is ex-
actly the matter overlooked.
For sociological inquiry and the problem of social order, for sociological in-
quiry, which is the problem of making researchable the real world of everyday
activities as occasioned structures, was to be realized by explicating Gestalt co-
herence as a practical achievement, i.e., as an organizational achievement. There
are a lot of claims on that score. I wouldn’t give a dime for the best of them. I’m
putting my bets elsewhere than with Sapir-Whorf linguistics, cognitive anthro-
pology, Cassirer’s phenomenology, Schütz’s “structures of relevance,” etc., etc. The
work of Sacks and Schegloff provides the strongest criticism of these treatments
by showing actual research consequences of using a corpus of materials to mo-
tivate these issues, as compared with principled treatments or uses of practical
metaphysical devices. The crux of their treatment is this: Their work provides an
unprincipled version of that coherence. Unless they can find the coherence arising
in conversational activity as an identifying property of conversational activity

they are not interested.
(3) A third collection of properties are called “the structures.” That feature
of conversational activity for conversationalists the presence to them of
uniform standard, repetitive, typical, directedness, etc., which are inde-
pendent of the local production cohort independence, exhibit as well rec-
ognized local practical achievements. Traffic events are located by getting
to the places where driving is going on. When you get to the place where
driving is going on the driving is what Sacks would speak of as a “com-
petent system”; it is already available just-there to parties to drive and to
driving and in ways that are peculiar to driving it provides for drivers, just
as conversations provides singularly for conversationalists, and queues
for queuers. Whether we are dealing with driving as competent systems
or conversations as competent systems the idea is that these systems are
available for the practitioners. They are available—they are present to—
they are practically objective and observable for the practitioners who use
those systems.
(4) The social facts are with respect to their accountability indefinitely dense.
Which is to say, with respect to their ways of being made matters for
observations and report, with respect to their ways of being made matters
are seeable-s ayable; matters witnessable-for-telling-for-w hosoever-
has-cause-to-s ee-and-tell; matters witnessable-in-a-phrase-after-a-
long-prolix-story-about-it-able; matters witnessable-for-the-gist-of-a
grunt-like-“oh, that . . .”-able, and see who that is and not everybody is
privileged to the that. It is not that we are in the same world. It has nothing
to do with the same world. It has only to do with the world; it has to do
with worldly things.
Big point: if we are to be all that careful in the way we talk, then surely we
are not talking in an advisory way about how we could come into the presence
of those things because we come to them in a very peculiar fashion: Namely,
our methods will be uniquely adequate to the phenomena that they find. And
that is another property of the social facts: they are uniquely adequate to the
phenomena that they find. And in that way we encounter the awesome phe-
nomenon that not any name will do. In some cases not any name will do; and
in other cases we are into the full nominalistic thing. If we are finding nomi-
nalism then it has to be in-of-and-as features of organizational objects. When
they are found in that way they will be called natural names. That is a bit of
local usage. I’m telling you a property of natural names: namely, they are indef-
initely dense. There is no end to them. That is to begin with, that there is no end
to them. They have other properties too that we need to take note of as we come
to examine them further.
(5) Another property, a lovely big property: the recognition of the social facts
is done—more than done, the recognition entails—more than entails,
the recognition is fateful—it is inescapably ethnomethodologically a
recognition done via a vulgar competence. Done via a vulgar competence
means it is done without thought for credentials, or maybe not thought for
credentials, but without requirements of credentials. If there are thoughts
and requirements for credentials they occur in that the phenomenon is
present as a worldly thing in the first place. So that it is already available to
the vulgar competence and on those grounds can announce itself as ques-
tionable, even as questionable to the philosophies, to the major philoso-
phies, where, what the general structures of experience or activity might
be, in general are provided for in the vulgar competence of the presence in
the first place to a question, or of a question. Hume, even while he would
have brought the entirety of the presence of the ordinary world under
question, could wonder that he could do this but at the cost of forgetting
all of it once he closed the door to his study and left it behind for the day.
You can so imagine the world as to require it to answer to every claim that
it exercises for its existence. You can do that as long as you close the door
to the study to get it done. Big problem: that vulgar competence study of
structures of practical action. Vulgar competence comes up for thematic
treatment in all of our rival treatments of the “problem of structure.”
(6) The vernacular way to speak of the sensible presence of an organizational
object is provided for by that object as an observable in its own right. The
observable in its own right exhibits itself in and through an embodied
presence of an observable in its own right. The features of conversation
that wait for me to find them out, jump off the transcript; they jump out of
the text; they stand forth in the tape to be heard again when once I passed
them by, to be recalled over and over again, to be played and therein or
thereby to be available over and over without change. They stand, they
are available in that lovely, beautiful way that we call it: objectively. They
are available in their fashion as objects; there for the taking, announcing
themselves. They are available, according to the work of a “observances.”
Not as disengaged spectacle but as observances. Think of an observance
according to the precepts of ceremonial work. Or think of the events of
a game with rules like chess or poker and of your being in their presence
in the way a chess player whose play satisfied the precepts of chess as a
game with rules is “into chess” and thereby the game’s events are sensible,
factual, objective, available in-of-and-as the observances of the game. Be
careful. “Observances” is a metaphor. But the notion of presence is cri

tical. It has to do with an embodied presence. The inspiration to take from
presence is not the kind of play we could make on the notion of what it is to
be observing play and games, but would be taken instead by the serious-
ness with which Merleau-Ponty speaks in the first part of his book of body
and in the second part of world and he is speaking to identical issues. The
notion of embodied presence is the core of the notion of the witnessability of
the full objective character of the world, in detail, in the kind of thing that
detail could possibly be.
Summary
Over the years that it has been going on, we have come in the presence of the
missing what of organization. So far: (1) I have identified provisionally the
missing what; (2) I wrote of its availability via case studies as matters of ethno-
graphic reportage. It is available (3) also in the compendium of these organiza-
tional event as the properties of Organizational Items. And (4), I wrote about the
Missing What with respect to their objectivity and observability.
What is next? Next are the claims that naturally organized ordinary activities
are fundamental phenomena in ethnomethodologists’ studies.
(1) In that we or any others not only in the professions but wherever organ-
ized activity is provided for in things like bureaucracies, families, small
groups, gangs, role relationships and so on, endlessly, these lay and pro-
fessional provided-for organizations of ordinary activities are unim-
portant phenomena. When compared to the astronomical magnitude
of organization in everyday activities they are of miniscule importance.
Let me specify this claim with a figure of speech. With respect to the cir-
cumference of the earth Mount Everest has the prominence, importance
and relevance of a pock mark on a billiard ball. The missing what that
ethnomethodologists have been at the work of discovering is to available
lay and professional versions of organization in ordinary activities as the
earth stands to the presence of Mount Everest. Orderings of ordinary ac-
tivities are imaginably extensive phenomenon; they are essentially other
than we do or could ever imagine them to be; and they await discovery.
They are available only to the work of discovery. They are not available to
any and all of the beautiful devices that the arts and sciences of practical
action and practical discourse provide as work for uncovering or coming
upon these organizational phenomena. The claim is this: there is one hell
of a lot of it, more than we can ever imagine, more than we ever would
have imagined, where the more is such that we couldn’t have imagined it
without the work behind us.
(2) Lay and professional theories of organization essentially misconceive
the phenomena of organization. The world is filled with sociolog-
ical descriptions that analyze a phenomenon that they are witnessably
about, and do so in the ways that they are parts of the phenomena that
they analyze. That formula has frequently been invoked in order to bring
up the phenomena of reflexive accountability, and to urge it as the sine
qua non of ethnomethodology’s enterprises. But that reflexive account-
ability is a phenomenon for ethnomethodological study. It is surely not
the phenomenon; it is not criterial of ethnomethodology. The reflex-
ivity of a question consists of the way a question is part of the activity it
questions. And so on for the “reflexivity” of names, diagrams, slogans,
instructions, or maps. That proposal delivers no news and solves no
problems of structure. Its virtue is as a research precept it points to pe-
culiar things that descriptions, names or instructions can be when they
are parts of the setting as of which describe, name, or instruct. In this
sense that and how descriptions “do the work” of describing, questions
“the work” of questioning, doubts of doubting, and all the other things
that local practices are heard for, analyzed as structures of the settings
as of which they are naturally present. Indeed reflexivity is a minus-
cule phenomenon and does not rate a second glance compared with
the overlooked embodied presence of natural organization as man’s so-
cial state.
Sacks points out whoever would have thought that this was what sociologists
were getting into when as standing policy sociology proposed that man is a
social animal. We have hardly begun to know its technical import; though we
can by some present findings surmise how immensely extensive that may be.
Sacks’s claims that no matter to what depth of detail conversational events have
been examined the examination has yet to run out of conversational events
(Organizational Items). The attempt several years ago by Kroeber and Parsons
to set straight what the issues were vis-à-vis cultural and social systems can be
considered theoretic baby talk. I’m saying that flatly; I’m not saying maybe. To
say that they provided access to the study of phenomena of organization is only
to allow that that thing that they went to such care to provide for as a method
that would give sociologists principled access in collecting their thoughts about
organized activity missed essentially what the phenomenon was and thereby
missed essentially—by essentially I mean missed without the possibility of
repairing it in those terms and in doing it in that way—access to what organiza-
tion was in the world.
(3) Lay and professional theories miss the phenomena of organization as

natural phenomena. Those are the phenomena we are up against. I shall
speak of them under the inspiration of Sacks’s way of speaking, though
I can’t say that I have his approval to talk on his behalf in my claims of
what natural is about. With that understanding I propose (a) that lay and
professional theories miss the phenomena of organization as natural phe-
nomena; (b) they miss that they are themselves included as natural phe-
nomena; and (c) they miss these phenomena with the use of the practical
devices with which the what of ordinary activities, or the what of social
facts is methodically arrived at. The claim about lay and professional the-
ories of organization is that they don’t just miss the what of social facts;
they don’t miss the phenomena of organization in any which way, but
miss them with and through the use of the practical devices with which
for that work for its practitioners there is a what of social facts, a what that
is arrived at, that they work to bring out, that they come to formulate,
that they see and make demonstrable, that they come to—all that is done
with practical devices as follows: (i) uniform, repeating, stable, directed
character of ordinary activities, (ii) independent of the local production
cohort, (iii) recognized by the local production cohort to be local produc-
tion cohort independent; and (iv), i, ii, and iii are recognized by members
to be practical achievements.9
Finally there now exist ethnomethodologies by which I understand attempts to

provide for principled versions of what the work of ethnomethodology can consist
of in established terms. In rival claims they propound theories of the member as
a practical actor, or the member as a practical reasoner, or society as a hot bed of
practical action, or they make modeled provision of the society as the hot bed of
practical reasoning. Ethnomethodologies, in that way, are also foundational rela-
tive to the practical disciplines that they stand as correctives for—disciplines like
the familiar analytic social sciences. If we were to follow that lead they too would be
found to consist of practical devices, and, like lay and professional theories, in their
uses these devices essentially misconceive the phenomena of organization. The
claims pose the next big step: they make it required that organizational phenomena
as natural phenomena be made specifically available to inquiry.
Editors’ note: This chapter was originally presented in an invited plenary

session entitled “Approaches to the Study of Social Structure” at the 1974
meetings of the American Sociological Association in Montreal, Canada. The
session’s presider was Mirra Komarovsky from Barnard College at Columbia
University, while Robert Bierstedt of the University of Virginia was the discus-
sant. Garfinkel’s presentation was entitled, “Naturally Organized Activities,” and
Gerhard Lenski of the University of North Carolina presented a second paper,

entitled, “Social Structure in Evolutionary Perspective.” The written version of
Garfinkel’s presentation is 109 triple-spaced pages. Partly in the interest of rea-
sonable chapter length, the editors of this volume have trimmed the paper, mostly
by eliminating redundancies and/or sections that appeared to be incomplete. As
much as possible, we have retained Garfinkel’s original wordings, his ways of
listing his points, and his punctuations or lack thereof, except where there were
glaring grammatical infelicities. The original document eventually should be
available in the online Garfinkel Archive, and we would direct interested readers
to that document as the authoritative source for this chapter. Unless otherwise
designated (via “Editor’s note” as a preface), endnotes are Garfinkel’s, but were
originally in parentheses in the body of the paper. As the Garfinkel Archive
becomes available online, it may be that the folders or tapes to which he refers in
this paper may become available for further reference.
The first paragraph of the paper, which we cut from the beginning of the
chapter, appears as something like notes for a final version, and reads as follows:
The invitation from the ASA to discuss E on structures provides an occa-

sion to abandon any further passing and hiding out in what I understand
the problem of structures to consist of as E’s achievement and aim. (Speak
on behalf of the work of ethnomethodologists and lay out a claim.) There
is an invitational character to the matters I am (summarizing) (describing)
(reviewing). In what I take the work’s achievement to consist of they compose
what its aims can properly consist of. (Elaborate this “ambiguity.”) Should
lead to: Therefore I am not about to permit anybody to talk in any which way
about what the study of the structures of practical action and practical rea-
soning could consist of.
In the original paper, the first paragraph of Chapter 5 herein begins immediately
after this paragraph. Courtesy of the Harold Garfinkel Archives.
References
Becker, Howard S. 1951. “The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience.” American
Journal of Sociology 57(2):136–44.
Cicourel, Aaron V. 1963. Method and Measurement in Sociology. New York: The Free Press.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
59:5–21.
Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Visual Studies 18(1):21–28.
Pp. 337–66 in Theoretical Sociology, edited by J. D. McKinney and E. A. Tiryakian.
New York: Appleton-Century Crofts.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for
the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50:696–735.
Sudnow, D. 1978. Ways of the Hand. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6
Rules and Policeable Matters
Enforcing the Civil Sidewalk Ordinance for
“Another First Time”
Geoffrey Raymond, Lillian Jungleib, Don Zimmerman, and Nikki Jones
Introduction: Rules and Social Action
Garfinkel’s re-specification of the relationship between rules, practical action, and

social order stands among his most important and far-reaching contributions to
the human sciences. Virtually no account of social life, whether focused on or-
ganizations, institutions, religion, family life, the law, politics, or the economy,
can lose sight of the central role played by rules, laws, norms, or other idealized
standards of behavior (which we will gloss as “rules” in the following discussion)
that participants draw on in organizing and evaluating their own and others’ con-
duct. Evidently, in addition to their centrality to social life via laws and institutions,
rules and normative expectations are directly bound up with notions of morality,
and so constitute a central dimension of social action and human relations.
Prior to Garfinkel’s paradigm-shifting insights, theories of social action—and
the place of rules in it—were dominated by the approach Parsons (1937) and
others (e.g., Homans 1958; Merton 1968; Parsons and Shils 1951) developed in
response to the limitations of utilitarian theories of social action (Camic 1989;
Heritage 1984). In this approach, which we call the “normative paradigm” (fol-
lowing Wilson 1970), conduct that conforms to the normative expectations
embodied in a rule is effectively treated as “caused” by that rule. Conversely,
departures from rules are explained by reference to a range of analyst-generated
conceptions of “deviance” (e.g., related to socialization, alienation, membership
in subcultures, and so on; Merton 1938; Parsons 1937). The result is a highly
reductionist account of social action that significantly underplays the range of
ways in which participants can orient to rules (Wrong 1961), the complex cog-
nitive and social processes that underpin the possibility of intersubjectively or-
ganized social action conducted by reference to rules (Wilson 1970), and the
range of ways that members can use rules in everyday and institutional settings
(Bittner 1965, 1967b, 1967a; Weider 1974; Zimmerman 1970; see Heritage 1984
for a comprehensive overview).
Rules and Policeable Matters 163
In his dissertation and later writings, Garfinkel recognized that the norma-
tive paradigm’s view of rules misunderstands basic elements of social action and
massively constrains the scope of sociological inquiry. It may be useful to ex-
plicate two interrelated elements of the normative paradigm as a way to begin
to understand the focus of Garfinkel’s critique: The treatment of interaction as
essentially rule-governed and the assumption that “sociological explanations
should properly take the deductive form characteristic of the natural sciences”
(Wilson 1970:59). Ultimately, it was this latter commitment, influenced by
the logical empiricism of the Vienna school social theorists (e.g., Hempel and
Nagel), that drove mid-twentieth-century sociologists to embrace a range of
assumptions about rules that turned out to be problematic.
Proponents of the normative paradigm argued that patterns of social
actions, and the stability of the social system of which they are a part, can be
explained by the complementary relationship between “needs dispositions”
that actors develop via processes of socialization (Parsons and Shils 1951:115,
see also Homans 1958) and the sanctioned expectations associated with the in-
stitutionalized roles those actors may occupy in their interactions with others
(Merton 1968; Parsons 1937). In this approach, “actors acquire characteristic
purposes and motives, that is dispositions, by virtue of their differential loca-
tion in society, and . . . they act in accordance to organized structures of expec-
tations supported by sanctions” (Wilson 1970:64; see Parsons and Shils 1951).
Crucially, these dispositions and expectations are treated as governing or regu-
lating action insofar as the theory treats them as the link between actors’ situ-
ations and their actions in those situations.
These same elements are, in turn, crucial for the sort of deductive model of ex-
planation that Parsons and others, following the logical positivism of the Vienna
school, viewed as characteristic of science. The aim of a deductive explanation is
to demonstrate that observable facts can be logically deduced from theoretical
concepts and empirical indicators (Wilson 1970). In the normative paradigm’s
approach to explain the causes of social action, theoretical premises would con-
sist of the theory’s model of the actor (e.g., with socially derived motives and a
capacity for communication that arises out of a shared symbol system), and empir-
ical indicators would consist of the normative expectations embedded in the so-
cial system in which she encounters others. Garfinkel (1967) famously noted that
such a theory renders social actors “judgmental dopes” because norms push and
pull them through their encounters with others, but they never have to choose,
judge, or reason. Moreover, because the analyst recruits rules, norms, and values
primarily to explain departures from “rationality” (i.e., why actors choose goals
or means of achieving them that cost them in terms of efficiency), the focus of so-
cial inquiry is reduced to a “sociology of error” (Heritage 1984:41; see also Bloor
1973) in which analysts become preoccupied with the distance between ordinary
and scientific reasoning, and with explaining why, on occasion, people depart
from rules or fail to meet expectations (see Garfinkel, Chapter 2, pp.81–83).
Drawing on insights from Wittgenstein and Schutz, Garfinkel shows that a
range of the normative paradigm’s underlying assumptions about rules turn out
to be problematic and limiting (Heritage 1984:110–15; Wilson 1970). As we shall
see, although developed independently of Garfinkel and others, H. L. A. Hart’s
Finitist critique of rules as regulators of conduct arrives at some of the very same
conclusions. In the following paragraphs, we focus on two of these assumptions.
First, these approaches assume that the application and use of rules in actual
situations and settings are largely straightforward or unproblematic. For this to
be so, however, one must make two further assumptions: (i) that both the rule
itself and the conditions of its use can be sufficiently elaborated to account for
the entire range of circumstances in which it might be applied; and (ii) that each
person using the rule has an identical understanding of it, the conditions of its
use, and any circumstance in which it is actually applied (Wilson 1970). From
accounts of even the simplest unwritten norms and rules that govern mundane
or everyday conduct (such as greetings and their return; see Heritage 1984:110–
15) to the application of laws in liberal democracies, however, these assumptions
have proven to be problematic. In a most basic sense, rules cannot apply them-
selves. As H. L. A. Hart (1961) argued,
Particular fact situations do not await us already marked off from each other,
and labeled as instances of a general rule, the application of which is in ques-
tion; nor can the rule itself step forward to claim its own instances. As a conse-
quence, persons acting in concert with others must apply rules, and in doing so
they must draw on interpretive resources to make sense of their settings, situ-
ations and choices. (1961:126)
Garfinkel (1967:21) found that in applying rules, members draw on “such con-
siderations as ‘et cetera,’ ‘unless,’ ‘let it pass’ and ‘factum valet’ ” to manage the
fundamentally open range of circumstances that any rule must cover, and thus
the wide range of meanings that may be associated with their use in specific
circumstances.
The use of these practices can be illustrated using simple traffic laws, such as
the requirement that drivers stop at an intersection when a traffic light is red. If
we take for granted the cultural, technical, and historical specifity of this rule
(and the use of cars and stop-lights), we can note that the use, application, and
meaning of it appears to be strightforward. And to be sure, persons for the most
part stop at such lights. In the US context, however, drivers arriving at an inter-
section finding a yellow (or warning light) must make complex judgments about
whether to stop before the intersection or proceed through it (even if it may turn
red while they are still crossing it). Complicating matters still further, however,
the courts have ruled that drivers can proceed through an intersection against a
red light if they believe the light to be malfunctioning, or that their vehicle is too
light to trip the sensors that govern its operations. Even these simple exceptions
raise yet more problems: What sort of events must transpire to enable a stopped
driver to recognize a malfunctioning light? What are the methods for proceeding
through an intersection against the light? How might another driver or police of-
ficer recognize a driver’s beliefs about the traffic light? As these example suggest,
even the most basic rules must “cover an indefinite range of contingent, concrete
possibilities. The rules must, in short, be applied, and to specific configurations
of circumstances which may never be identical” (Heritage 1984:121). In this
way, any use of a rule casts an occasion as a further instance of a common cir-
cumstance, as “generic,” often giving rise to a sense of “this again” (another red
light), even as any specific application is unavoidably contingent, variable, and
context specific (see Maynard and Clayman 2018). Thus, Garfinkel’s pithy obser-
vation that rules “are always applied ‘for another first time’ ” (Heritage 1984:390)
reminds us that “features of social life can embody both distinctiveness and re-
currence,” and that both “are equally fair game for analytic explication” (Maynard
and Clayman 2018:134).
Second, these approaches assume that rules, norms, and laws hover above or
outside of settings, institutions, and actions, and thus that their actual use on
specific occasions is essentially uninteresting. In viewing rules in such an ideal-
ized way, analyses of the use and application of rules tend to lose just how those
using rules “render such idealizations relevant as prescriptions, justifications,
descriptions, or accounts of their activities” (Zimmerman 1970:223). Rather
than being viewed as above, or outside of institutions and situations, Garfinkel
argued that rules, norms, and laws “can be treated as topics and as features of
the very settings they are taken to organize” (Maynard and Clayman 1991:390).
Accordingly, Garfinkel’s re-specification highlights the embodied character of
rule use: rules are used by actual people, with agency, acting in the company of
other people, also with agency, managing situations whose salient features and
participants’ orientations to them have to be coordinated. Thus, those using rules
are agents in situations in which their actions have consequences that overflow
the literal sense of a rule, while they nevertheless remain accountable to it.
This approach is perhaps nowhere more masterfully demonstrated than in
Bittner’s analysis of the work-a-day world of policing (Bittner 1967b, 1967a;
see also Meehan 1989, 2006). His (Bittner 1967b) observations on the peace-
keeping practices used by police patrolling skid row open an especially vivid
window into the ways in which participants orient to, invoke, and use rules and
laws in their encounters. Officers’ efforts to manage the “virtually limitless” do-
main of their service activity results in an approach at odds with conventional
conceptions of civil liberties. In discussing the matter of “discretion” in policing,

Bittner (1967b) writes,
. . . it is the rare exception that the law is invoked merely because the
specifications of the law are met. That is, compliance with the law is merely the
outward appearance of an intervention that is actually based on altogether dif-
ferent considerations. Thus, it could be said that patrolmen do not really en-
force the law, even when they do invoke it, but merely use it as a resource to
solve certain pressing practical problems in keeping the peace. (1967b:710)
Drawing on these insights, this chapter examines occasions in which officers in

“Golden City,” California, enforce a controversial ordinance, the Civil Sidewalk
Ordinance (or CSO, colloquially referred to as the “sit/lie” ordinance), which
prohibits sitting or lying on the street during much of the day. In explicating how
the participants use the CSO “for another first time” (Garfinkel 1967:9) we can
begin to appreciate how any participant’s use of a rule illuminates the particulars
of a scene and much that extends before and beyond it.
The Civil Sidewalk Ordinance
The CSO, which was adopted by voters in Golden City in November 2010, is
simple enough: it prohibits persons from sitting or lying on the sidewalk between
7 a.m. and 11 p.m., with certain exceptions.1 Drawing on a database of several
hundred hours of video and interviews collected in ride-alongs with the Golden
City Police Department, this chapter explicates how officers and residents use
and make sense of the law across a range of settings and activities and how they
manage what are formulated as sanctioned exceptions to it. The analysis we
develop depends on the data supplied by both the researcher’s presence (as an
ethnographic observer) across a range of settings and times where the law is en-
forced and the video recordings they made of those encounters. The first allows
the use of the law in practice to be witnessed across the contingencies of situ-
ations of its use, while the latter preserves the details of those encounters for re-
view and analysis.
The CSO is one of many quality-of-life laws adopted to help the city manage
nonviolent activities considered nuisances in public spaces. The Golden
City Police Department identifies 36 such laws, more than any other city in
California, intended to “protect the well-being of [non-homeless] residents”
and “preserve the quality of public spaces” (Budget and Legislative Analyst’s
Office 2016). These include regulations concerning sitting, sleeping, eating,
urinating/defecating, camping, panhandling, soliciting, drinking in public,
and so on. Because most of the behaviors they prohibit are not wrong in and
of themselves (they fall under the legal rubric mala prohibita, or “wrong as or
because prohibited”) and would not be illegal were they to occur on a person’s
private property (e.g., in contrast to mala in se crimes such as assault, theft,
rape, murder, etc.), quality-of-life laws disproportionately impact chronically
homeless citizens.2 Although communities ostensibly adopt such quality-of-life
laws to provide law enforcement officials the legal means to manage forms of
conduct that can lead to disputes and other forms of disorder, sociologists have
argued that they are perhaps better understood as emerging out of “society’s
perception of a continuing need to control some of its ‘suspicious’ or ‘undesir-
able’ members” (Chambliss 1964:75).
Quality-of-life laws, such as the CSO, emerged after the broad vagrancy laws
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were declared unconstitutional (in the
US Supreme Court decision Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville 405 US, 1972).
In this legal environment, cities responded to growing populations of home-
less persons in the 1980s by adopting more narrowly targeted laws that banned
specific behaviors in specific places, creating a network of laws that effectively
criminalize “life-sustaining behaviors” of the chronically homeless (Coalition on
Homelessness 2015). Such quality-of-life laws targeting the chronically homeless
citizens are on the rise across the country (National Law Center on Homelessness
and Poverty 2014).
In Golden City, the CSO emerged out of a successful campaign by business
owners in the Park neighborhood. Contending that the presence of chronically
homeless residents in the neighborhood was bad for business, shop owners
formed the Coalition for Safe Sidewalks (City Hall Fellows 2012) with the aim of
providing law enforcement officials additional tools to address problems they as-
sociated with chronic homelessness, including public safety concerns, discour-
aging tourism, and preventing potential customers from entering businesses.
Opponents argued that the law unjustly criminalizes homelessness and that ex-
isting laws already provided officers with resources for addressing any legitimate
safety concerns (City Hall Fellows 2012).
Officers enforcing the CSO refer to their encounters as “move-alongs” because
their basic aim is to move the subject from the current position or place. The
formal contents of CSO are straightforward and unambiguous: persons are pro-
hibited from sitting or lying on any public sidewalks between the hours of 7 a.m.
and 11 p.m., though persons can only be ticketed and fined for the offense after
they have been warned or informed of its provisions. The ordinance also includes
escalating penalties ranging from fines ($50–$100) up through a misdemeanor
offense with a penalty of 30 days in county jail if a person fails to comply with an
officer’s directives or is found sitting or lying on a public sidewalk for a second
time within 24 hours.3
We can render the gross outlines of the practicalities of rule use observable by
considering the hypothetical case of a “strict” or literal enforcement of the CSO.
Were officers to follow the letter of the law, they would be required to ticket, fine,
or arrest most of the homeless people they encounter on a daily basis, and would
spend virtually all of their time keeping these residents on their feet for 16 hours a
day—knowing that they will encounter the very same people and circumstances
the following day. To avoid the conflicts and endless entanglements that a strict
enforcement style would entail, officers and homeless residents have arrived at
a range of unwritten, tacit agreements regarding when, where, and how the or-
dinance will typically be enforced. In this respect, the patterns of enforcement
that have emerged over time reflect a set of tacit agreements between officers and
the chronically homeless population regarding which aspects of street life are,
and are not, “police-able” (Meehan 1989). These broad, unwritten agreements
enable its primary targets—the chronically homeless residents of the city4—to
anticipate how the ordinance will be enforced, and thus to conduct themselves in
accordance with its basic provisions most of the time. It is the participants’ use of
the rule in practice, fitted to the exigencies of actual scenes of social activity, that
we explicate in what follows.
In a most basic sense, officers invoke the ordinance and its exceptions as re-
sources for distinguishing police-able problems from other concerns, thereby
minimizing the degree to which they become enmeshed in the routine personal
and medical problems of the homeless residents they encounter, or entangled in
the provision of solutions to the large-scale, chronic social conditions that give
rise to their predicament in the first place. That is, officers invoke the ordinance
and its provisions to distinguish police-able circumstances from ones that they
deem beneath or beyond the scope of their authority. These considerations, and
analyses of the specific circumstances in which these practical determinations
are made, however, reveal a range of other phenomena tied to the characteristics
of the ordinance and aspects of the settings and persons it targets. In addition to
the specific sense that participants make of individual encounters, these include
the participants’ reflexive orientation to the distribution of knowledge they treat
as a condition of the ordinance’s use and links between an officer’s authority to
enforce the ordinance and tacit agreements regarding when, where, and how the
CSO is typically enforced.
Enforcing the CSO: Knowledge and Policable Subjects
We begin by examining encounters that officers treat as basic or gross violations

of the CSO: when chronically homeless persons are sitting or lying on the side-
walk or park in a time or place where the ordinance is regularly enforced. In
doing so, we consider variations in the ways that officers and residents initiate
and conduct these encounters, focusing on two basic features: how subjects
are positioned as accountable for violating the CSO, and how officers raise or
probe how and what the subjects know about the CSO. In contrast to mala in
se offenses, officers cannot assume that residents are aware of mala prohibita
offenses such as the CSO because they apply to ordinary forms of conduct that
are legal in most other circumstances. Indeed, the text of the CSO stipulates
that persons cannot be cited for violating it until they have been warned of
its provisions (Golden City Municipal Code, Section 168 (d), p. 69). In addi-
tion, precisely because the CSO prohibits conduct that is not otherwise mor-
ally problematic, officers and residents may view aspects of its enforcement
as unjust or problematic even in circumstances where all agree that persons
are subject to its provisions. For example, in an interview, one officer explains
feeling “pulled in two different directions” by the need to respond to pressures
from some community members who “don’t like the way [chronic homeless-
ness] looks” and the desire to “uphold the rights of homeless citizens” (GCPD
PA 05172012 3 Interview1, Urban Camper Ethnographic Interview). In ana-
lyzing these encounters, then, we will track how officers and residents invoke
knowledge of the CSO and the ways in which participants use the occasions of
its enforcement to delineate the moral, legal, and personal dimensions of these
occasions.
We begin by considering a simple instance of enforcement in which both the
officers and the subject treat their shared background knowledge of the CSO as
a basis for making sense of the subject’s violation of it, and the ways that each is
accountable to the other for aspects of its enforcement. In Extract (1), two officers
walking through a park find a man lying down in a sleeping bag with his eyes
closed. Following an opening in which the officers identify themselves and ex-
change greetings with the subject, the latter anticipates the reason for the encounter
by explaining how they came to find him in his current position (lines 7, 9).
(1) GCPD_SleepingManinPark2_CE_06212012.mov
(FPO =female police officer, MPO =male police officer,

CM1 =civilian male)
1 MPO: Hello, it’s thuh police.

2 (0.5)
3 MPO: How ya doing’?
4 FPO: Hi
5 CM1: How are you?
6 MPO: Good ( )
7 CM1: > I lay down for a minute-

8 MPO: yea?
9 CM1: > I lay down for a about a minute an’ I fell asleep.
10 MPO: [Oh you did. Yeah.
11 FPO: [(Yea:h)/(wo:w)
12 CM1: Yea
13 FPO: > You know y-ya gotta sit up in the
14 park, ri[ght?
15 CM1: [Yea, I know.
16 It’s no problem. I just lay down
17 an’ I f-I fell<I gotta go anyways: so:.
18 FPO: Okay. Are you a veteran?
19 CM1: Yeah
The subject’s preemptive explanation (in lines 7 and 9) reveal the cognitive and
moral dimensions of the ways participants use rules. In a most basic sense,
the subjects’ explanations anticipate that the officers have contacted him for
violating the CSO. In this respect, the subject’s knowledge of the rule, to-
gether with his reflexive awareness that he is currently violating it, provides a
basis for making sense of the officers’ presence and the project that prompted
them to initiate contact. But his claims also reveal his orientation to the moral
dimensions of violating a rule: he claims that this violation (and perhaps the
failure to take remedial action before the officers contacted him, see Extract
4) was an accident—an inadvertent, unintentional byproduct of falling asleep
(line 9; see cases 7, 8, 11, and 12 for cases in which the very same states of af-
fairs, lying down and even sleeping, are treated as unremarkable). After regis-
tering and appreciating the subject’s account (lines 10 and 11), FPO explicitly
invokes the CSO by inviting the subject to confirm that he “knows” about its
provisions (lines 13–14). This apparently simple utterance indexes a range of
contextual features of the encounter:
• Its design strongly presumes that subject knows about the law via the use of
a “you know” prefaced declarative with an appended tag question (Heritage
and Raymond 2012), providing a potential challenge to the subject’s ac-
counts (in lines 7 and 9) which treated sleeping, rather than lying down per
se, as accountable.
• The strength of the officer’s presumption takes into account the subject’s
preemptive account and the officer’s categorization of him as a chronically
homeless person; she goes on to offer a range of services that are available
to him as a homeless veteran. (See Extract 6 for a case involving a potentially
homeless subject that disclaims any knowledge of the CSO.)
Most centrally, however, FPO’s utterance (in 13–14) constitutes an intervention

into the situation it formulates (Garfinkel 1967): By inviting the subject to con-
firm that he knows about the ordinance, the officer treats his current position
as reflecting a lapse in his abiding by a rule of which he is aware, and thereby
implicitly requests that he remedy this lapse. At the same time, the officer’s use
of this method for intervening (essentially “reminding” the subject what he
knows), together with its sequential positioning (after an expanded opening
and the subject’s account), treats her enforcement of the CSO as incidental to
the occasion, and as morally benign (i.e., she won’t admonish him or give him
a ticket, as may be projected via the formulation of a complaint, as in Extract 5;
see Schegloff 2005). In turn, the subject attempts to provide a possible resolu-
tion to the encounter: After sitting up and confirming that he knows about the
ordinance (line 15), the subject reasserts his account for the lapse (using “just”
to claim that his formulation exhausts his reasons for laying down as a means of
emphasizing that he fell asleep by accident; see Drew 1992 on the maximal pro-
perty of descriptions) and attempts to preempt any possible remedial action by
invoking a pending obligation that would have occasioned his imminent depar-
ture “anyways” (lines 16–17).
Several features of this encounter are noteworthy. First, FPO proffers the
most benign grounds for the resident’s blatant violation of the CSO and the tacit
agreements that otherwise inform its enforcement by initially seeking to estab-
lish that he “knows” about it. Second, having confirmed that he knows about the
CSO, and having been “caught out” nonetheless, the resident continues to antic-
ipate the officer’s concerns by offering a preemptive and minimizing explana-
tion for and remedy to them. The anticipatory dimension of his actions evinces
a basic moral commitment to the CSO (and respect for the officer) even as his
current position (in a sleeping bag) reveals him to be flagrantly violating it. That
is, the resident attempts to maintain that he is on the “right side of the law” even
as his current physical position reveals him to be on the wrong side of it.
While encounters such as this are prompted by resident’s violation of the
CSO, the method the officers use to enforce it—a “reminder” composed using
a “you know” prefaced formulation—partly reflects the ordinance’s status as
a mala prohibita offense. This can be appreciated in several ways. First, such
formulations treat residents’ familiarity with the CSO as a basis for action by di-
rectly indexing, however remotely, the possibility that they may not know of it.
While one can credibly claim to have forgotten about, or to be unaware of, mala
prohibita ordinances (see Extract 6), competent members of a society cannot
make similar claims about mala in se offenses. Thus, the use of a reminder to
enforce laws pertaining to assault, theft, or murder would sound bizarre (and
we find none in our database). Further, in our database, officers enforcing other
quality-of-life laws use similar formulations to invoke the basis on which their
recipients do or should know about the law they are currently violating, as in the
following cases.
(2) GCPD_YouKnowYouCantBeSellinHere_MI_08122013.mov
1 MPO: > You know you can't be sellin here. We’ve had this
2 conversa:tion before
3 CF1: I kno:::w.
(3) GCPD_NoTrespassingSign_MI_08122013.mov
1 MPO: > You know they got the no trespassing signs

2 CM1: (A’ight)
Evidently officers use such formulations to establish that their recipients should
or do already know that they are violating the law, as well as how they could or
do know, as a way of directing them to resolve the matter. That is, by recurrently
invoking a local basis for their inferences about what recipients’ could or should
know about the ordinances they are violating (i.e., they have told the person be-
fore in 2, or the subject could the read posted signage in 3), the officers tacitly ac-
knowledge that the possession of such knowledge is a contingent, rather than an
obligatory (and thus moral) matter, even as they hold the subject accountable for
knowing it. And yet in Extract 2 a different form of moral accountability can be
observed: The subject’s stretched “I know” (line 3) confirms the officer’s assertion
that he has already warned her (see Mikesell et al., 2017), thereby tacitly acknow-
ledging the personal nature of her transgression (i.e., the same officer has caught
her for a second time).
Of course, the very fact that the officers have contacted the subject to issue a
reminder suggests a kind of failing beyond the violation of the ordinance itself. As
these cases suggest, officers don’t always orient to violations of the CSO in moral
terms. And yet knowledge of a rule should enable persons to conduct themselves
in light of it—or at least anticipate how it may be enforced by others—thereby
potentially obviating the need for enforcement by others in most cases. Indeed,
many of the chronically homeless residents in Golden City avoid contact with
the police by avoiding times and locales where officers strictly enforce the CSO.
Because the subject in case 1 (as well as 7 and 8 in the following) are sleeping,
however, they fail to see the officers approach, and thus fail to take steps that
might preempt the need for contact. In other cases, however, conscious persons
who are aware of the ordinance, and how their current position will be viewed in
light of it, often seek to avoid direct contact with the police by sitting up, packing
up their belongings, or making other preparations to move along as soon as they

see an officer approaching them.
Officers can exploit this orientation, using their sheer presence as a means
of “moving along” chronically homeless residents (who are aware of the ordi-
nance). For example, in the following, an officer pulls his police car parallel to
an apparently homeless person sitting on the sidewalk of a main street in the
middle of the day. Upon seeing the police car, the subject gets up and begins
to walk away, moving in the opposite direction of the squad car. The officer
slowly reverses his car, following the subject. After following him for about
10 seconds, the officer parks and narrates the events and his approach to the
researcher.
(4) GCPD_StopandWatch_PA_05172012.mov
1 MPO: So like a guy like that like my job is basically to get

2 rid of him. Get ‘em out of this area. . . That’s why like
3 I’ll get like guys like this, I mean I’ll just sit there
4 and watch ‘em. And just by me watching ‘em or whatever
5 when I interact with them.
.
. ((3 lines omitted re: psychology degree))
.
9 (5.0)
10 R: And so, does that usually work? Just kinda parking an
11 watching ‘em?
12 MPO: Yea, I mean I can’t explain to you what I do to these
13 guys but I mean I-I just like-I drive em ab-
14 absolutely insane. The thing is like I mean a lot of,
15 > times too, I mean if they know I’m around they will
16 > actually leave the area and go downtown or something.
Where officers can count on subjects knowing a rule, they can use their presence
as a means of enforcing compliance with it. As this officer explains, establishing
a focused presence (i.e., by conveying that the officer’s presence anticipates pos-
sible engagement with a specific recipient or set of recipients) can be enough
to move a person out of the area. Such practices suggests that the modes of en-
gagement police developed for policing “skid row” (Bittner 1967b) have been
expanded to cover the chronically homeless wherever they may be found. As
Bittner (1967b:708) observed, officers patrolling skid row “. . . install themselves
in the center of people’s lives and let the consciousness of their presence play the
part of conscience.”
Not every person contacted by an officer manages to preempt or avoid con-

tact in this way. When officers encounter homeless residents who appear to be
conscious and minimally aware of their presence, they treat those residents’ ap-
parent failure to even belatedly comply with the rule as a basis for action and in-
ference that are reflected in the officers’ approaches to enforcement. For example,
in the following case, an officer contacts a person, whose appearance and be-
longings suggest chronic homelessness (and thus knowledge of the ordinance),
sitting against a newsstand on a busy street at midday. Following multiple efforts
to establish contact with the subject, the officer adopts a more confrontational
approach to enforcing the CSO (in lines 12, 14, and 17) than we observed earlier
in Extract 1, and in Extracts 7–12 in the following.
(5) GCPD_ManonSidewalk_PA_05172012
1 MPO: ((Bang))
2 MPO: Yo!
3 (1.5)
4 MPO: Hey!
5 (1.5)
6 MPO: Hello?
7 (1.5)
8 MPO: Hey.
9 (0.5)
10 MPO: (Coming up?)
11 (2.0)
12 MPO: Hey, You can’t sit on the sidewalk.
13 (1.5)
14 MPO: Talked about this yesterday
15 (0.5)
16 CM1: No.
17 MPO: Yeh. (0.3) I definitely did
18 ((Civ begins getting up))
After the officer’s initial attempts to initiate contact (lines 1 and 2) with the
subject sitting against the newsstand fail, the officer positions himself in front of
the subject and continues to pursue a response (lines 4, 6, 8 and 10). Although
the subject appears to be aware of the officer (e.g., beginning around line 5 he
looks up, and then to the researcher; see Figure 6.1), he does not respond or
show any other orientation to the potential basis for the officer’s presence. We
can note, then, the officer’s use of a complaint formulation (in line 12, “you can’t
X”; cf. Schegloff 2005) to enforce the CSO, which treats the subject’s position
as a problem to be remedied. This orientation is underscored by the officer’s

reference to their prior conversation (line 14) as a means of asserting that the
subject is knowingly violating the CSO (lines 14 and 17). In this case the officer’s
more aggressive approach to enforcement suggests that he treats the subject’s
inaction (despite multiple summons in lines 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10) as a form of re-
sistance, defiance, or disrespect, rather than some other problem (e.g., that he
is uninformed about the ordinance, as in Extract 6, or medically incapacitated).
We can also note that the officer oversees the subject’s departure, thus evincing
a level of mistrust that contrasts with the officer’s approach in Extract 1 (and
Extracts 11 and 12).
Officers approaching subjects who remain sitting or lying on the sidewalk
may entertain other possible reasons for their apparent inaction. For example,
when an officer’s focused presence (and greeting) fail to prompt a sitting subject
to move (as in Extract 4), the officer explores the possibility that he may not be a
local or is unaware of the ordinance, instead of simply treating him as uncoop-
erative (as in Extract 5). The subject in Extract 6 presents a potentially ambig-
uous profile. On the one hand, the young man’s clothing, as well as the place and
position in which he is sitting (on a milk crate in front of a drugstore at midday),
suggest that he may be homeless. On the other hand, the subject’s apparently
Figure 6.1 Golden City Police Officer enforcing the CSO rouses a chronically
homeless resident; Extract (5), GCPD_ManonSidewalk_PA_05172012
groomed appearance and the absence of a bedroll suggest that he has a location
to sleep, shower, and store his belongings. As the officer takes note of him sit-
ting in a shopping area subject to police scrutiny, she uses a step-wise approach
to establishing contact that provides the subject several opportunities (lines
1–5) to preempt or avoid a full-blown encounter with her (e.g., by moving, as
in Extract 4). She initially stops a short distance from him and announces her
presence with a summons (line 1) when the subject does not notice her on his
own. Only after the subject fails to begin moving in the midst of a substantially
delayed exchange of greetings (lines 3 and 4) does the officer step closer and in-
itiate the more sustained encounter that follows with a request for identification
(lines 6).
(6) GCPD_SitandLieArrest_MI_08052013
1 FPO: Hello:,
2 (1.3)
3 CM1: Hi.
4 FPO: Hi,
5 (.)
6 FPO: Got your ID on you?
7 (0.3)
8 CM1: U::mm (0.3) °no.°
9 FPO: No, yih don’t,<you from the city?
10 (.)
11 CM1: Yeah.
12 FPO: You’re aware of the civil sidewalk ordinance?
13 (1.5)
14 CM1: No:.
15 FPO: They call it sit-lie. You heard’ve it,
16 (2.0)
17 CM1: U:mm
18 FPO: How long’ve you been in thuh city:
19 (1.4)
20 CM1: Several years.
21 FPO: Okay:uh ‘cause they uh approved that in uh two
22 thousand ten.
.
. ((four lines omitted regarding reason for recording))
.
27 CM1: uh:[mm
28 FPO: [°Okay.° So do you have your ID or not.
29 CM1: No: I don’t have no ID on me.

30 (0.3)
31 FPO: You’ve never been wa:r:ned or::
32 CM1: °Nope.°
33 FPO: Told anything about thuh: >civil sidewalk<
34 ordinance.
35 CM1: No.
36 FPO: ‘n what’s yer name?
.
. ((50 seconds omitted; FPO gathers information from
subject including his address, and radios to verify his
CSO status))
.
38 CM1: Can you explain this sit lie law?
39 FPO: Yeah there’s uh rule th’t sitting or lying on thuh
40 sidewalk . . .
.
. ((4 lines omitted re: ordinance))
.
45 FPO: I’ll give you a flyer about it. So you’re more
46 informed [about it
47 CM1: [yeah, uh: do ya have one?
48 FPO: Yeah. As soon as I confirm that there isn’t
49 documentation that you’ve already been warned
50 about it.
Here, instead of moving directly to enforcing the sleep/sit ordinance (as in cases
1, 4, and 5, and cases 7–12), the officer suspends that project while she seeks to
establish whether the subject is a local (lines 10–12) and begins to pursue what
he knows about the CSO. The declarative query she uses to initially probe the
matter (in lines 13) strongly presumes (Heritage and Raymond 2012) that (as a
local) he knows about the ordinance (lines 10–12). After he flatly disclaims any
such knowledge (line 15), the officer’s follow-up queries (in lines 16, 19, 22–23)
convey her skepticism regarding this claim, suggesting it is inconsistent with his
status as a long-term resident (see especially lines 19, 22–23).
Following a series of negatively framed declarative questions that convey the
officer’s continuing skepticism regarding the resident’s claims (lines 31, 33–34),
the civilian attempts to embody his lack of awareness of the CSO by positioning
himself as a willing recipient of the officer’s “expla[nation of] the law” (line 38).
In doing so, this resident displays at least an openness to hearing about the ordi-
nance, thereby avoiding the possible implication that his current violation of it is
willful or flagrant. In this respect, he adopts an approach that parallels what we
observed with the resident in Extract 1, though from the perspective of a person
who claims to be unaware of the law. Such a claim would be undercut if the res-
ident has already been warned, however, and this officer remains unmoved.
While she explains the law and mentions a flyer she can give him (lines 45–46),
she suspends the realization of this offer until after she confirms the he hasn’t
been informed of the CSO (lines 48–49). Thus, across this exchange, just what
the resident knows about the CSO comes to be contested by the participants, and
a further adjudication of the case is deferred until that matter is resolved.
Unlike every other move-along case in our database, this encounter results
in the citizen’s arrest when the officer’s effort to establish whether he has been
warned about the CSO reveals that he has a warrant for his arrest. Because run-
ning checks for warrants, or even requesting subjects’ names, are not routine
elements of most move-along encounters, this person’s troubles seem to arise out
of his failure to move when he first sees the officer, his subsequent insistence that
he is unaware of the CSO, and the apparent ambiguity of his status as a homeless
person. Had the officer categorized the subject as a chronically homeless person
from the outset (as in 1), she would likely have presumed he knew about the or-
dinance and adopted a different method of enforcement (as in cases 1 and 4).
Similarly, had the subject simply admitted that he knew of the CSO and walked
away, he very likely would have avoided arrest.
This case illustrates the complexity associated with enforcing even a simple
rule “for another first time.” Here the officer treats the subject’s lack of move-
ment once she established her presence as an indication that he may not be a
member of one or another of the intersecting categories presumed to possess a
working knowledge of patterns of enforcement in the city (chronically homeless,
residents of the city). In this respect, the officer’s enforcement of the sit/lie rule is
sensitive to her understanding of “what socially defined types of persons are le-
gitimately entitled to have what kinds of trouble” (Garfinkel 1967:156).
In the preceding cases (Extracts 1, and 4–6), officers enforcing the CSO ap-
proach and contact residents sleeping or sitting on the sidewalks of busy streets
in the middle of the day—that is, at places and times when the CSO and the range
of tacit agreements shape its enforcement converge in making that conduct
policeable. By virtue of its status as a mala prohibita offense, officers treat gross
or direct violations of the CSO as raising questions about what residents know
about it, revealing a way in which they treat knowledge about the ordinance as a
contingent, rather than strictly moral, matter. In this way, a feature of rules and
rule following that typically remains a presupposed feature of participants’ con-
duct—whether they know about a rule—comes to be topicalized as a method for
enforcing it (see also Weider 1974).
In addition, participants treat such (potential) violations as making relevant
remedial actions that position the subject as a potential offender. For example,
chronically homeless residents may avoid contact by moving, or acknowledge

their offenses with explanations (as in 1) or apologies. Absent such actions by
residents, officers (may) admonish (Extract 5), ticket, or arrest (Extract 6) the
subjects they encounter. The varied ways in which members treat their talk and
other conduct as embodying an incarnate “consciousness” of the law across
these cases suggests that studies of “legal consciousness” (Ewick and Silbey
1998) would benefit from a closer examination of the specific circumstances in
which laws are invoked, applied, and used.
Laws and Tacit Agreements: Enforcement at

the Boundaries of the CSO
Officers contacting residents for mid-day violations of the CSO in locales sub-
ject to strict enforcement only account for a small subset of move-alongs in
our database. More common are contacts at what might be called the “bound-
aries” of the CSO, such as when enforcement begins in the morning or phases
out in the evening, or takes place on streets and neighborhoods subject to
less stringent enforcement. Residents and officers take a different approach to
these encounters, even though they also involve violations of the CSO. In these
cases, assumptions about what residents know, and the methods officers use to
manage compliance, reflect participants’ orientations to the ways that any ac-
tual occasion of enforcement aligns the tacit agreements that shape the CSO’s
routine enforcement.
We begin by documenting the reality of the tacit agreements that inform how
officers enforce the CSO, which are perhaps best exemplified by the “morning
wake-up call.” Although the law prohibits sitting or lying on the sidewalk be-
tween 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., and makes a second contact within 24 hours a ticket-
able offense, officers contacting homeless residents in the morning (after 7 a.m.
and before 12 p.m.) approach their encounters as a “wake-up call.” For example,
they rarely if ever give tickets (for an initial contact at such times), even though
they encounter the same residents daily (i.e., within a 24-hour time frame).
Instead, officers seek to rouse the sleeping men they encounter, as in the fol-
lowing extracts.
(7) GCPD Observation Southern 5.8.2012 JF 2of13GetUpMan
1 MPO: >Rise’n=shine.< Hey [get up.

2 CM1: [(I’m talkin’)
3 MPO: Can you get up?
4 CM1: I’m talkin’
5 MPO: What?
6 CM1: I’m talkin’
7 MPO: Well you gotta get up now:. Co’mon man.
8 (0.3)
9 MPO: If you get up I can go.
10 (0.3)
.
. ((8 lines omitted re: CM1’s nephew))
.
18 MPO: Well this is uh: This is your wake up call.
19 CM1: a’right.
(8) GCPD Let'sNotGetCozy NO 05282012
1 FPO: Larry! Let’s not get cozy.

2 Let’s get up and get our stuff
3 You’re getting all co-comfortable again
4 And we gotta get up
The treatment of these encounters as “routine” is reflected in the ways that the
basis for them remains tacit. The officer’s encouragements (“rise and shine”) and
admonitions (“let’s not get cozy”) index, and rely on, participants’ knowledge of
the CSO as the basis for the encounter’s projects without either party explicitly
topicalizing it (as in Extracts 1, 5, and 6). Moreover, even as officers seek to get
the residents up and moving, neither party orients to the homeless resident’s po-
sition and state (e.g., sleeping) as problematic (in contrast to cases 1, 5, and 6).
Similarly, in our data, officers also routinely walk past persons they find sleeping
on the sidewalk in the early evening, even though the ordinance officially remains
in effect until 11 p.m.
Officers’ enforcement of the CSO also varies by locale, even though the or-
dinance ostensibly applies to every sidewalk in the city. In cases where they en-
counter residents near an area where enforcement is typically relaxed, officers
may direct the residents to those places. For example, officers may direct persons
to adjacent neighborhoods, as in the following (lines 3–5).
(9) GCPD UrbanCamper PA 05172012
1 MPO: Okay. We’re all done here. Thanks very much.

2 I’m glad that you are able to walk without falling down
3 > an’ as you can see the [neighborhood] is down yonder.
4 CM1: I’m gonna wander over . . .
Or officers may tell subjects to move from a main avenue to a less exposed place
on a side street, as in the following (line 4).
(10) GCPD Observation Southern 5.8.2012 JF 2of13GetUpMan
1 MPO: Gotta get up an’ walk.

2 C’mon.
3 CM2: ()
4 MPO: > Yea:h, gotta g-gotta go around the corner
Evidently, if officers did not make some such accommodations for the ordinary
routines of daily life, they would either be forced to ticket most of the chronically
homeless persons they encountered every day, or they would be forced to ensure
that the chronically homeless persons they encounter remain on their feet for 16
hours a day. These tacit accommodations regarding when and where the ordi-
nance will be enforced allow officers to avoid becoming continuously entangled
in managing the problems of chronic homelessness, even as they work to miti-
gate many of the conflicts that gave rise to the CSO’s adoption.
Although the CSO ostensibly governs the conduct of residents that lie or
sit on the sidewalk, officers nevertheless also find themselves accountable to
it. The broad discretion officers have in deciding when, where, and how to
enforce the CSO is tempered by complaints that other (presumably housed)
residents may call in. Because these residents may not be aware of (or ac-
countable to) the tacit agreements that otherwise inform the CSO’s enforce-
ment, responding to such complaints may require that officers depart from
them. In our data, officers manage apparent departures from these informal
agreements by invoking the “calls” and “complaints” that have occasioned the
contact, thereby suggesting that they must be attended to lest they be viewed
as failing to do their job. Here, instead of invoking or probing what residents
know about the CSO, officers account for their actions by explaining the local
bases for their departures from the tacit agreements that otherwise inform
patterns of enforcement.
For example, in the following case an officer approaches a homeless man, lying
in a sleeping bag on the sidewalk of a side street at dusk. While the subject is tech-
nically in violation of the CSO, his selection of an out of the way place (with vir-
tually no pedestrians) in the evening would not ordinarily attract the attention
of officers. We can note then that the subject does not anticipate that the officer
will view his position and location as problematic (e.g., by moving or preemp-
tively apologizing, as in Extract 1). Instead, the officer announces that she is obli-
gated to enforce the CSO (indexed by “move you along”) because of a complaint
(lines 5–6).
(11) GCPD Move-Along NO_05282012.mov
1 FPO: Hi::.
2 CM1: Oh hey.
3 FPO: How are ya?
4 CM1: Oh pretty good. How are you doin’?
5 FPO: Good. I have to move you
6 alo[::ng<I got a complaint, ok?
7 CM1: [Ok
.
. ((7 lines omitted re: shelters))
.
15 FPO: Ok. Thank you. Take your time
16 getting ready. ((FPO turns, walks away))
Here, it is the officer who treats enforcement of the ordinance as the account-
able matter. We can note that the officer positions herself as a beneficiary of the
subject’s cooperation (Bergmann 1993; Clayman and Heritage 2014; Raymond
and Zimmerman 2016), and invokes the caller’s complaint, rather than the CSO
per se, as grounds for moving the subject.
Similarly, in the following, an officer approaching a man lying in the doorway
of a business at dusk treats his enforcement of the CSO as a complainable matter
(Schegloff 2005).
(12) GCPD Move-Along CE 06202012
1 MPO: Hello::,
2 (.)
3 MPO: Sir. How you doing?
.
. ((6 lines omitted re: opening))
.
9 MPO: Wanna go to a shelter or anything like that?
10 CM1: Oh no, I’m okay.
11 MPO: Okay yea, unfortunately someone ca::lled.
12 CM1: Oh-ughh
13 MPO: Yeah, you know usually I wouldn’t-you know:
14 I hate to do it so.
15 CM1: Tha:ts oka::y. I’ll mo::ve.
16 MPO: Tha:nks ma:n,=I appreciate it.<I mean you understand, I
17 wouldn:’t really bo[ther you if I didn’t have to but

18 CM1: [I kno::ow
19 somebody called [n’ I have to do my job.
20 CM1: [I know, I understand
21 MPO: Okay.
22 CM1: No problem.
23 MPO: Okay: yeah thanks. Like I said if you wanna
24 move to another doorway, someone [don’t complain
25 CM1: [Okay
26 MPO: it’s fine with me.=I mean (.) it doesn’t really
27 solve the problem me moving you every[where.
28 CM1: [Alright,
29 I understand
As in the prior case, the officer reports that “someone called” (line 11) and, by
way of a gratuity token, positions himself as a beneficiary of the subject’s cooper-
ation and understanding (line 23). In addition, he offers a remedy for his putative
offense (lines 23–24) and comments on the futility of enforcing the ordinance in
the current circumstances (lines 26–27).
Across Extracts 7–12, officers moving residents for violating the CSO don’t
ask or assert what they know about the CSO. Instead, they treat residents’ com-
pliance with the tacit agreements that inform the CSO’s routine enforcement
as evidence of their willingness to comply with it in principle, and thus their
familiarity with the ordinance itself. Moreover, in Extracts 11 and 12, officers
use various methods to display their commitment to the tacit agreements that
otherwise inform how the CSO is enforced, even as their current enforcement
of it departs from those agreements. For example, on finding the subject of
complaints sleeping on the sidewalk (during hours covered by the CSO), they
nevertheless treat those residents’ positions, knowledge of the CSO, and lack
of remedial action as unremarkable, and treat their own effort to enforce the
CSO as accountable and objectionable. Such cases reveal the ways in which the
participants’ understanding of the CSO, and officers’ authority to enforce it, is
linked to both the text of the law and the tacit understandings that inform its
routine invocation. Officers strongly assert their authority to enforce the CSO
in circumstances where these two matters align in locating a residents’ position
as problematic (as in cases 1, 4–10). By contrast, officers’ orientation to their di-
minished authority to enforce the CSO in circumstances that depart from these
tacit understandings (in Extracts 11–12) can be found in the accounts, apologies,
and remedial actions they produce in doing so, and in their positioning as bene-
ficiaries of the residents’ cooperation.
Concluding Remarks
In this chapter, we have canvassed Garfinkel’s respecification of rules, account-

ability, and social action, and have used the empirical case of police officers
enforcing the CSO to begin illustrating how this intervention opens a window
onto the endogenous methods that participants use to organize their encounters
with others. As the details of these analyses demonstrate, Garfinkel’s innova-
tion vastly expands the ways in which settings and activities can be studied
and understood, how analysts can ground their claims in the conduct of the
participants being studied, and thus how they can account for both recurrent
features of social life and the distinctive moments through which that recur-
rence is produced (Maynard and Clayman 2018). As we anticipated earlier,
these dimensions are linked.
As we have shown, Garfinkel’s re-specification of the way participants use rules
retains the normative paradigm’s emphasis on the moral dimensions of social ac-
tion while avoiding its pitfalls. In place of the normative paradigm’s “judgmental
dope,” Garfinkel’s re-specification places the problems of social action and mo-
rality in the hands of the participants—without introducing the randomness and
indeterminacy characteristic of other approaches that emphasize actors’ agency
(see Alexander 1987:252 on the “individualist’s dilemma”). In a most basic sense,
tracking when, where, how, and with what import participants invoke rules
enables us to see how rules constitute an environment of “considerations” and
a texture of accountability that shapes behavior through the reasoned, or at least
reasonable, choices it opens up for them. Knowing about the rule and how it will
or may be invoked allows participants to see both what they should roughly do,
what they can get away with, and the possible consequences of being found in
breach of the rule. In this way, we can appreciate how Garfinkel’s approach allows
us to capture how those using rules are agents in situations in which they act,
while nevertheless remaining accountable to the rule.
It is the granular details of this emphasis on agency and accountability that,
in turn, enables us to see how rules are used “for another first time.” As we have
shown, officers’ use of the CSO as part of their peacekeeping efforts—when and
where they enforce it, the methods they use in doing so, the various ways in which
officers and residents alike are accountable to the ordinance, who apologizes to
whom, and so on—reflects how they cast the specific particulars of those scenes
as documents of an underlying pattern described in the text of ordinance, the
exceptions it provides for, and the sedimented patterns of enforcement that have
preceded the current encounter. And yet, in each case, we can also see how their
use of the rule reflects the particularities of just this occasion, as well as projects
and activities that may extend beyond the rule itself. For example, any use of
the CSO reflects how officers categorize this subject (as homeless, local, etc.)
and what he is presumed to know about the ordinance. Similarly, officers and
residents flexibly adapt the practices they use to initiate encounters and invoke
the rule. For example, our analysis explicates the specificity achieved via any
number of variations: how officers approach subjects (waking them up, walking
directly up to the subject, using a step-wise approach, and so on) and how the
residents respond to the officers’ presence and approach (moving, apologizing,
remaining seated, etc.); how the rule is introduced and formulated (e.g., as a re-
minder, a complaint, as part of a query, and so on); how any specific occasion for
enforcement is positioned as consistent (or not) with the myriad tacit agreements
that inform its use or the exceptions it provides for; and how enforcement or
compliance may figure in the emerging relationship between the participants
(e.g., as a personal favor or offense), and so on. In this way, we have sought to
explicate how those using the CSO are agents in situations in which their actions
have consequences that overflow the literal sense of it as an ordinance, while
they nevertheless remain accountable to it. Indeed, in just the ways that these
scenes are fashioned as “another” violation of the same ordinance—the varied
and detailed practices required to constitute a unique moment as a violation of
the “same” ordinance—is itself a source of variation and complexity. That is, the
effort to produce “recurrence” is, itself, a source of “distinctiveness” (Maynard
and Clayman 2018). While this can be appreciated across any source of variation,
it is perhaps most vividly illustrated in cases where the participants’ use of the
rule invoked their ongoing relations, including how previous encounters shape
current ones. In the very ways that participants oriented to “another” violation
as entailing a personal (rather than simply legal) transgression, they invoke
both continuity in and change to aspects of their emerging relations. In sum, in
finding how participants apply rules “for another first time,” we can begin to ap-
preciate how any participants’ use of a rule illuminates the particulars of a scene
and much that extends before and beyond it.
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7
The Cooperative, Transformative
Organization of Human Action
and Knowledge
Charles Goodwin
Building Human Action
Action is central to both human language and human sociality (Enfield and
Levinson 2006; Levinson 2012; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). Within
face-to-face interaction, the intrinsic dialogic organization of language (Linell
2009) is constituted as an emerging, multiparty process as participants assemble
action and units by operating on a range of different kinds of semiotic materials
that each is producing with an orientation toward the other (Goodwin 1979,
1980, 2000; Iwasaki 2011; Kaukomaa, Peräkylä, and Ruusuvuori 2013). This
chapter will investigate how actions are built by performing systematic opera-
tions on a public substrate which provides many different kinds of resources that
can be reused, decomposed, and transformed. Insofar as such processes preserve
with modification structures provided by the environments that constitute the
point of departure for new action, this process is accumulative, something that
is central to the distinctive organization of human culture and society. Through
such accumulation, highly varied settings, cultures, and distinctive ways of
knowing and operating upon the world are created and lodged endogenously
within particular communities. Members of such communities thus face, as part
of the intrinsic organization of action itself, the task of building new members
who can be trusted to see, understand, and act upon the world in relevant ways.
Structure-Preserving Transformations on a Public Substrate
Actors can build new action by selectively reusing resources provided by a prior
action. Figure 7.1 provides an example.1 Chopper, in line 2, uses Tony’s own
words against him by employing “make me” to embed Tony’s challenge within a
new counter-challenge of his own.
HUMAN ACTION AND KNOWLEDGE 189
Figure 7.1 Building new action by decomposing and reusing materials created by
earlier actors.
Chopper constructs his utterance in line 2 by (1) decomposing the language

structure provided by Tony’s (i.e., he snips Tony’s utterance into two parts so that
he can insert his own new talk between these segments), while (2) adding new
materials in order to produce a quite different action of his own. Chopper thus
builds subsequent action by operating on Tony’s utterance as a public semiotic
structure that provides him with resources that can be reused to build a new ac-
tion of his own. Building subsequent utterances through decomposition, reuse,
and transformation of language structure provided by another is a central locus
for grammar as a form of public, social practice.
This process of building new action by reusing, with transformation, public
resources that can be found in the environment being used as a point of depar-
ture for emerging action is quite general.2 It will be a constitutive feature of all
of the actions to be examined in this chapter. For clarity I will call the materials
being operated on, such as Tony’s talk in line 1, a substrate.
Two features of this process have special importance. First, the subsequent
actor does not simply repeat the substrate, but instead reuses with modification
the resources it provides to transform the substrate and change it into something
new (this can of course occur even when the words remain unchanged, as demon-
strated for example by the different referents of you as speakers change). Second,
despite such modification, the materials made available by the original substrate
are preserved in a relevant and consequential form. This process of simultane-
ously (1) preserving structure provided by the activities of earlier actors, while
(2) systematically modifying that structure to build something new, is a central,
distinctive feature of human action, one that makes it possible for human culture
and knowledge to accumulate in a systematic fashion. For example, Isaac Newton
developed his law of universal gravitation by building upon, while generalizing
and transforming, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, which in turn were made
possible by Kepler’s access to the astronomical observations of Tycho Brahe.
Building new action by performing operations on an existing public sub-
strate is central to how participants grasp the meaningfulness of subsequent
talk. Consider, for example, a turn-at-talk that consists entirely of the word No.
By using this word, disagreement is built by performing a specific operation on
public structure produced by someone else: the utterance and action being op-
posed. The word No is not heard as an amorphous objection to just anything in
the world, but instead as objecting to precisely what was just said. No does not
stand alone as an isolated self-contained unit. Instead, it incorporates as a cru-

cial feature of its own organization what was said by someone else in the prior
turn.3 If this prior substrate is not attended to and taken into account, the action
produced by the word No is not properly understood. This may seem thoroughly
mundane (as indeed it should if it is a manifestation of a very general feature of
human action). Consider, however, the case of a person whose entire vocabu-
lary consists of words such as Yes and No. In 1979, when Chil was 65 years old, a
blood vessel in the left hemisphere of his brain ruptured. He was left completely
paralyzed on the right side of his body and with a vocabulary that consisted of
only three words: Yes, No, and And. As a speaker Chil has almost no syntax. He
can produce limited arrangements of Yes and No (e.g., “No no,” “No no no,” “Yes
no,” “Yes and”), but these mark the limits of his ability to combine linguistic signs
together. Does this mean that he lacks the ability to build action by combining
signs into complex wholes? With such a restricted lexicon Chil might seem to
lack the ability to produce the rich, flexible combinations of different signs that
are a hallmark of human language. Despite this, he continued to function as a
powerful speaker in conversation. How was this possible?
Rather than treating language as an isolated, self-contained system, Chil
builds utterances by combining structurally different kinds of resources within
configurations where each is mutually elaborated by the others,4 that is, as a form of
cooperative action. Despite his catastrophically impoverished lexicon, Chil retains
rich, fluent prosody. Goodwin (2010a) describes a situation in which Chil is trying
to get his son Chuck to do something by repetitively pointing first toward a bowl on
his lap with the remains of a grapefruit he has just eaten, and then in front of him. He
seems clearly to want Chuck to do something with the grapefruit. However, despite
repeated guesses, Chuck cannot figure out what action is being requested. In this se-
quence almost all of Chil’s utterances have virtually identical lexical content: variants
of “No No” as Chil rejects candidate proposals made by Chuck (Figure 7.2).
Chil’s utterances in Figure 7.2 are built by performing systematic operations—
basically forms of strong disagreement—on talk just produced by Chuck. Each of
Chil’s No No’s incorporates as a crucial component of its own relevant meaning the
immediately prior talk being objected to. Thus, as an action, line 11 tells Chuck
that Chil does not want him “ta get some,” while line 14 is heard to be saying that
Chil does not want Chuck to take “that” (the bowl with the remains of the grape-
fruit) away, and line 17 tells Chuck that he should not “take some back with us.”
With almost identical lexical content, each of these utterances builds a different
kind of action, and, moreover, one that is fitted in fine detail to the local environ-
ment from which it emerges. Despite his catastrophically impoverished vocabu-
lary, Chil is able to talk about many different things with fine precision by using No
to indexically incorporate into his own action-rich language structure provided
by others (Goodwin 2007b). While his lexicon is poor, indeed almost nonexistent,
(a) 7 Chuck:
8 Chil: Ni nan o.
9 Chuck: Di ya want·
10 Chuck: Want me ta get some. (.) No.
11 Chil: Ni nuh
12 (0.9)
13 Chuck: Do you want me ta take that away.
Laminated Action
Stance: Prosody
Target: Lexico-Semantic Structure
14 Chil: No No.
(b) 15 Chuck: Oh: you like it Yeah yuh.
16 Oh s:- Take some back with us. =
17 Chil: No no.
18 (0.6)
19 Chil: No: No. ((deeper voice))
20 Chuck: Oh no it’s illegal.
Figure 7.2 Varied prosody over the same lexical items
Chil’s semantics are rich because of the way his talk is built by performing structure-
preserving transformative operations on a substrate created by others.
Substrates as Organizational Resources within

Human Interaction
For clarity it is useful to be more explicit about why I am choosing to use the
term substrate to describe the local public configuration of action (such as Tony’s
utterance in line 1 of Figure 7.1) that is operated on (frequently through pro-
cesses of decomposition, reuse, and indexical incorporation) to build a next
action. In biochemistry a “substrate is a molecule upon which an enzyme acts,”

a process that transforms it “into one or more products” (http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Substrate_ (biochemistry)). This process of transforming the resources
provided by a present environment into something new is consistent with the
transformative processes I am focusing on here. My initial interest in substrates
was triggered by reading hypotheses proposing that during periods of intense
volcanic activity in the early earth, pumice rafts might have provided substrates
that enabled the initial chemical formation of life. Such rafts could concentrate
and help select “the diversity of chemical reactants needed for life” while also
providing compartments where relevant reactions could occur (Brasier et al.
2011:725). A place where diverse semiotic resources can be brought together and
accumulated through time into a public configuration that allows new action to
be built, through precise, local operations on this complex, is central to the per-
spective on human action being developed in this chapter. The notion of sub-
strate provides a way of focusing with clarity on emergent, local configurations of
semiotic heterogeneity as sites of transformation.
In very interesting work, Ingold (2011:10) uses the term substrate to describe
a blank surface that is given shape by having structure imposed on it by an actor.
My use of the term is quite different in that I focus on how the substrate and the
resources it provides make possible specific forms of subsequent action. Chil’s
situation provides one example of how crucial substrates are as troves of re-
sources for the construction of meaning and action. Chil’s daughter Pat noted
that Chil’s memory actually improved after his stroke. To build coherent, novel
statements, he required a substrate with specific resources he could appropriate
and operate on to show others what he was thinking (Goodwin 2007b). When he
thought of something he wanted to tell others he was therefore frequently put in
the position of having to work actively to keep this in mind until he could find a
substrate (typically in someone else’s talk) that he could exploit to make public
what he wanted to say.
A substrate is not simply an encompassing context, but instead an immedi-
ately present semiotic landscape with quite diverse resources that has been given
its current shape through the transformative sequences of action that culminate,
at this moment, in the current action. The quite limited set of resources that con-
struct the current action constitutes the point of departure for the action to be
produced next. Like the pumice rafts that selectively concentrated a particular
array of chemicals in a contained environment, the current substrate organizes
coherence by gathering together a limited, but uniquely appropriate, collec-
tion of resources implicated in the organization of the specific actions now in
progress. Participants not only attend to just these resources (such as the words
Tony used to build his initial challenge in Figure 7.1 or Chuck’s immediately
prior talk in Figure 7.2), but also actively use them to build in concert with each
other subsequent meaning and action that emerge coherently from what has just
gone before, and which provides the materials for the construction of what will
happen next.
The Laminated Organization of Human Action
Chil’s talk in Figure 7.2 contains not only lexical items but also rich, highly varied
prosody. In Goodwin (2000) I argued that human beings build action by gath-
ering together different kinds of signs, each organized within a distinctive me-
dium that is crucial to its organization. Thus the semiotic structure provided by
a hopscotch grid makes relevant action possible only when it is inscribed on a
medium that allows actual bodies with weight to jump through it. Each of these
contextures of specific forms of semiosis (lexical structure, prosody, visible
embodied displays, etc.) organized within a particular medium can be called a
semiotic field, and the set of semiotic fields that participants demonstrably attend
to in order to build the action of the moment can be called a contextual configura-
tion. This productive heterogeneity, the ability to construct action through the si-
multaneous use of different kinds of materials, sits at the heart of human action.
For conciseness and clarity in this chapter I have focused on Chil’s simulta-
neous use of the lexical items No No, and prosody in Figure 7.2, but a range of
other semiotic fields, including gesture and bodily orientation, are also crucial
to the organization of the actions he builds there (Goodwin 2010a, 2011). The
term lamination will be used to describe a set of different semiotic fields organ-
ized as layers of diverse resources. Though there are limitations to lamination as
metaphor, I am choosing to use it for several reasons. First, I find that the visual
metaphor offered by the notion of lamination—a set of layers organized with ref-
erence to each other—provides a simple and vivid way to look clearly at how a
variety of semiotic fields with quite different properties work cooperatively with
each other simultaneously to build evanescent actions that might endure for only
a few seconds, but which have rich, analytically interesting complex internal
structure (see Figure 7.2). Using the notion of lamination to organize the display
of data, as most of the figures in this chapter do, allows us to move beyond a mere
record of the words spoken to try to find what Wittgenstein (1958:§122) termed
“a perspicuous representation [which] produces just that understanding which
consists in ‘seeing connexions.’ ” Thus it allows us to see substrates in a simulta-
neous as well as a sequential fashion, and to look clearly at how specific semiotic
fields contribute to the differential meaning-making practices that work together
to build particular actions.
Second, in classes at the University of Pennsylvania when I was a graduate
student, Erving Goffman, then in the process of developing his deconstruction
of the speaker that eventually appeared in “Footing” (Goffman 1979), pointed

frequently to the laminated organization of both actions and participants within
human interaction. By this he meant that their organization encompassed layers
of different kinds of phenomena (thus a single utterance might contain the quite
different voices of a character being animated, and the stance and commentary
of the current speaker on the talk being quoted). While not applying the model
he developed in “Footing,” which focused exclusively on the speaker, I continue
to find the notion of lamination a productive resource for separating analytically
the different kinds of structure that participants draw upon to build action in
concert with each other.
Delaminating Talk and Action Provided by Others
The laminated structure of action, the way in which it is composed of layers of

different kinds of semiotic materials, is something that participants in interac-
tion can disassemble and reorganize in order to build subsequent action. Once
again, Chil provides an example.
Chil’s ability to use lamination to creatively build action is not restricted to
his own impoverished vocabulary. He can attach rich and expressive prosody to
lexically and syntactically complex talk constructed by others, and thus use their
words and linguistic ability to say things that would be impossible for him alone.
Figure 7.3 provides an example.
Chil’s son Chuck, who lives in California, is visiting Chil at his home in
New Jersey. There is a relevant distribution of knowledge between the pri-
mary addressee, Chuck, on the one hand, and Chil and Pat on the other. Pat is
Chil’s daughter, and lives near him in the New York area. They are discussing
a friend of Chil’s, whom Chuck recognizes, but Pat knew well. The talk to
be examined here thus occurs within an epistemic ecology in which Chuck
is an Unknowing Recipient, while Chil and Pat are Knowing Recipients
(Goodwin 1981).
After Chuck in line 1 of Figure 7.3 asks if the friend being talked about was a
radiologist. Pat, in lines 7–8, responds that he was chief of radiology at a pres-
tigious hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Pat tells Chuck this
without any heightened evaluation in her prosody. However, in line 9 Chil
overlaps what Pat is saying with a string of syllables containing an extended pro-
sodic contour. This enables him to display a strong evaluative stance to what Pat
is saying. In essence, he re-laminates Pat’s utterance by replacing her prosody
with his own, while retaining, and using for his own purposes, the rich lexicon
and grammatical structure that she has constructed. Since his talk is produced
simultaneously with Pat’s, I am not able to isolate their intertwined contributions
(a) Piggybacking a Stance Display

Prosody
Fluent Speaker:
Complex Linguistic Structure
Chil: Different Prosody with

New Stance Display
Speaker &
Compositional Structure
(b) 1 Chuck: Was he a radiologist?
of Chil’s
2 (0.3)
Utterance/Action
3 Pat: Mm hm.
Distributed Across
4 (0.3)
Two Participants
5 Chuck: Em hm.
6 (0.5)
7 Pat: He was chief of radiology at
8 Colum bia Presbyterian Medical Center
9 Chil: Yih dih dih dih dih duh Yea :h
10 Chuck: uh huh
Chil’s Gaze
11 Chil: [Di dih duh Treats Chuck,
12 Chuck: uh huh. Not Pat, as
13 (0.4) His Addressee
14 Chuck: Wow. Assumes
15 (0.3) Position
16 Chuck: (wum) K– K+ K+ of Speaker
Unknowing Knowing
Recipient Speakers
Figure 7.3 Chil builds an action by attaching his prosody to rich language structure
created by someone else
to obtain separate pitch tracks to display the different prosody of each speaker.
Indeed, their co-occurring action in overlap is precisely the phenomenon now
being pointed to analytically.
Chil does not simply affiliate to what Pat is saying, but adds a new evalua-
tion to the news she reports, transforming Pat’s report of an occupation into a
formulation of his friend as someone who occupied a special, exalted position.
Some demonstration that the participants themselves in fact treat what Chil is
doing as such an assessment is provided by Chuck’s “Wow.” in line 14. Further
support for the assessable status of what Chil is doing is provided by the subse-
quent development of the sequence. This reformulation of what Pat was saying
constitutes the point of departure for a new, independent telling by Chil (not to
be examined here).
With his prosody Chil says something that Pat does not, while using the con-
tent of her talk to do this. He thus acts as an independent speaker in his own
right, rather than as someone who is merely affiliating with what Pat is doing.
Chil’s ability to transform Pat’s action by replacing her prosody with some-
thing different demonstrates how action is constituted through the dynamic
interplay and mutual elaboration of different semiotic fields. The words used
to state a proposition in Chil’s and Pat’s utterances are quite literally identical,
since they are produced by Pat alone. However, Chil and Pat each construct a
subtly different action by using prosody to laminate a unique stance display on
this common linguistic structure. Chil builds his action by using rich prosody to
perform simultaneous, transformative operations on the substrate provided by
Pat. Indeed, though most analysis of how action can be built and understanding
is displayed within talk-in-interaction has focused on its sequential organiza-
tion, for example how the understanding of an utterance is revealed through a
subsequent response to it,5 the simultaneous, concurrent organization of ac-
tion is equally important. By providing different kinds of semiotic materials, ac-
tors in structurally different positions (e.g., speaker and hearer, storyteller and
principal character, etc.) can contribute in consequential ways to the organiza-
tion of a single action (Goodwin 1980, 1984; C. Goodwin and Goodwin 1987;
Iwasaki 2011).
This has a number of theoretical consequences. For Chil, but I would argue
for speakers in general, both the utterance and the speaker have a distributed ex-
istence. A crucial component of the talk that is central for proper understanding
of Chil’s utterances has been constructed by someone else, his interlocutor. His
action is intrinsically cooperative (different participants produce the varied
materials required for the actions he builds here) and deeply social in that he
builds meaning through systematic operations on language structure provided
by others. Using the distinctions provided by Goffman’s (1979) deconstruction
of the speaker, Chil acts as the principal, the party responsible for stating partic-
ular propositions and constructing specific forms of action. However, the author
of much of what he says, that is, the party who constructs the linguistic sign com-
plex required to explicitly state the proposition required for the intelligibility of
Chil’s action, is someone else. Indeed, it would be literally impossible for Chil
to construct by himself the sign complexes he needs to state the propositions
found in his utterances here. What happens here provides a vivid example of
the argument made by Bakhtin (1981:293–94) that the word in language is half
someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with
his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to
his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropria-
tion, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after
all, out of the dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in
other people’s mouths, in other people’s concrete context, serving other people’s
intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.
It might be argued that what Chil does here is special and idiosyncratic, a cre-
ative but unusual adaptation to his inability to produce linguistic structure of his
own. However, fully fluent speakers in mundane conversation also build action
by decomposing the layers of semiotic fields that others use to build utterances.
Goodwin and Goodwin (1992) describe a video-recorded interaction in which
a speaker telling a story used elaborate paired hand gestures to depict a set of
steps. A recipient then repeated these same gestures but attached them to new
words, the children’s song “Little Bunny Fou Fou,” while soliciting appreciation
of his heckling parody from another recipient. More generally, phenomena such
as next-turn repair initiation (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977) and aggra-
vated correction (Goodwin 1983) are frequently constructed by repeating part
of what was said by the prior speaker in the last turn, while replacing the original
prosody with a contour that displays doubt or opposition. Participants them-
selves thus not only treat utterances as complex structures assembled through
the dynamic interplay of different layers of diverse semiotic phenomena (talk,
prosody, gesture, etc.), but are able to decompose those structures and reuse
parts of them, while changing how what has been appropriated is to be under-
stood by embedding it within a new contextual configuration (Goodwin 2000).
Chil’s status as a speaker is revealed as well through the way in which he
organizes his body. Rather than positioning himself as simply a recipient to what
Pat is saying, he begins the utterance by raising his eyebrows toward Chuck while
endorsing for him what Pat is saying. He then looks briefly toward Pat in the
midst of his talk, but returns his gaze to Chuck well before his emphatic “Yea:h”
that ends the turn (see the image in Figure 7.3). The action he is performing by
using his body to address Chuck in this way is telling someone about the status of
his friend as news, an action that would be inappropriate to a knowing recipient
such as Pat (who is in fact providing the words necessary to describe the position
he occupied), but is appropriate to an unknowing recipient.
In the simplest terms, Chil builds an utterance with novel, complex lexicon
and syntax by attaching a prosodic contour, with a new display of stance and
evaluation, to talk being spoken and constructed by another.6 Here we find a de-
construction of the speaker (Goffman 1979) which distributes the activities that
constitute visibly doing being a speaker into multiple bodies, and streams of talk
being produced by separate actors, who are reflexively attending to each other
and using each other’s signs and actions as resources for the construction of their
own. Chil’s ability to act as a speaker here incorporates what Pat is saying as a cru-
cial component of his own action. Rather than a model of the speaker that takes
as its point of focus mental phenomena within the individual actor, here we find
speakership being constituted through the ability to participate in appropriate
but differentiated ways in a field of interactively sustained action constituted

through the public organization of language use (what Linell [2009] describes as
the intrinsic dialogic structure of human language and action).
Rather than being lost in this process, Chil’s cognitive and emotional life as an
individual (for example, as someone with his own stance toward the events being
described that differs from Pat’s) is constituted as something that is public, con-
sequential, vivid, and flexible. These same issues are relevant to the organization
of his agency. One issue that has emerged in the study of agency is the difference
between individual and “social” agency, the latter typically being investigated
as agency lodged within a social or corporate group, rather than an individual.
Insofar as Chil’s agency is organized within ongoing processes of cooperative
semiosis (e.g., appropriating signs constructed by others to do his work) it is thor-
oughly social. He requires the words of Pat to talk about the accomplishments of
his friend, the radiologist, to Chuck. However, what emerges from this process
is not the amorphous diffusion of his agency into a social group, but instead very
vivid recognition by his interlocutors of Chil’s agency as an individual, for ex-
ample as someone who has something unique to say.
With respect to the larger argument of the present chapter, actions emerge
within environments constituted through the public presence of diverse semi-
otic resources. Action is fashioned in part by performing operations on this sub-
strate. This combinatorial process makes it possible for actors to systematically
incorporate structure and meaning built by others into the interior organization
of their own action. By doing so, they can invoke forms of knowing that would
be impossible for them to display as isolated individuals. Human beings inhabit
each other’s actions.
The Accumulative Power of the Laminated Structure

of Human Action
The way in which human actions are composed of layers of distinctly different
kinds of semiotic materials provided Chil, faced with the limitations imposed by
his aphasia, with crucial resources. By operating on laminations, he was able to
construct combinatorial action of his own, and to incorporate crucial semiotic
materials found in other participants’ action, for example their rich language,
into new utterances of his own.
Environmentally coupled gestures (Goodwin 2007a) use pointing to tie lan-
guage to specific phenomena in the environment. Here again, action is built by
laminating layers of different kinds of semiotic resources together. Figure 7.4
provides a simplified diagram of how such actions are built by combining sepa-
rate semiotic fields, each of which makes a distinctly different contribution to the
Layers of Diverse Semiotic Fields

Each Making a Different Contribution Each Field
to the Intelligibility and Organization Acts as an
of the Action in Progress Interpretant
for the Others
• Participation Framework
Mutual Co-Orientation of
Separate Bodies
Towards Each Otherr
& Relevant
Phenomena
in the Surround
“It’s got that disturbance” • Language “En this one”
• Environmentally
Coupled Gesture
• Munsell
Chart
• Phenomena in
Domain of Security
Here Dirt to Be
Transformed into
Archaeological Data
Figure 7.4 The laminated structure of human action
intelligibility and organization of the action in progress.7 In the action depicted

on the left, a senior archaeologist is showing a student how to recognize a distur-
bance in the dirt they are trying to map. A disturbance is any later activity that
distorts an archaeological feature that is the focus of study. Here a nineteenth-
century plow has moved dirt into part of the patterning that was created by a post
that held up a house in a sixteenth-century Native American village. The pro-
fessor on the left highlights the disturbance for the student by moving her hand
over the colored stripe in the dirt left by the movement of the plow, while using
her thumb and finger to indicate its width.8
In the action depicted on the right of Figure 7.4, two young archaeologists
are engaged in the task of systematically describing the color of some of the dirt
they are excavating. To do this, they use a Munsell color chart—a grid of color
patches scientists have constructed to show relevant variations in color. Next to
each color patch is a hole. A sample of the dirt to be classified is put on the tip of a
trowel, placed under the chart, and moved from hole to hole so that the archaeol-
ogist can see in the same visual field both the dirt being classified and a particular
reference color. When the best match is found, the chosen color is then entered
on a coding sheet as both grid coordinates, and a standard color name (Goodwin
2000). Sue proposes a particular color as a candidate possibility by pointing to-
ward it while saying “En this one.” Jeff responds by moving the trowel with the
dirt to the hole next to that color sample.
Note how, in both of these examples, pointing gestures are tied to something
in the environment that is being carefully scrutinized by the participants.
In both examples in Figure 7.4, participants build action by laminating dif-
ferent kinds of meaning-making resources together. Complementary semi-
otic fields include (1) the mutual orientation of the participants’ bodies toward
both each other, and the materials they are working with, which creates a public
focus of attention and a locus for shared work; (2) language, including relevant
deictic terms, organized within sequences of action within human interaction;
(3) hands making environmentally coupled gestures (Goodwin 2007a); (4) con-
sequential phenomena in the surround that are being intensely scrutinized by
the participants as part of the work they are doing together. Here what is being
studied is dirt that is to be transformed into archaeological data.
The action on the right includes an additional semiotic field, the Munsell
chart, that is not found in the action on the left. In that each of these layers
constitutes a semiotic resource which is used by an actor to interpret another
semiotic resource, the insertion of a new layer is not merely additive, but rather
a transformative event that changes the organization of the entire configuration.
The contingent inclusion of a range of different semiotic fields, such as the addi-
tion of the Munsell chart to the formal arrangement found on the left, provides
an intrinsic source for variability, creativity, and intense local adaptation in the
organization of human action. Rather than being restricted to a fixed repertoire,
participants have the ability to incorporate quite diverse materials into the orga-
nization of the actions they are building together.
The Munsell chart itself is the accumulative product of a history of building
frameworks for knowing the world in action—relevant ways by linking diverse
materials with complementary properties into enduring configurations that
provide architectures for perception. Its structure includes the patches of color
which provide samples that can be pointed at and visually compared with the
dirt being classified, a grid that makes possible the identification of any par-
ticular patch as a set of standard coordinates, color names, and the distinctive
physical properties of its medium, paper, which permits holes to be cut to create
the architectures for perception used by the archaeologists to compare dirt to be
classified with color samples.
The way in which the work of our predecessors can be passed on to us in
forms that provide organization in fine detail for current work, such as using
the Munsell chart to classify the color of dirt, or a map to determine where in
the ocean samples are being taken by oceanographers (Goodwin 1995), or
the specification within a legal system of what can count as a crime (Goodwin
1994), shapes the epistemic activities being pursued by diverse communities in
very fine detail. Indeed, these accumulative practices make possible particular
forms of action, such as finding someone guilty or innocent, reading a recipe, or

making a scientific map, that are specific to particular communities or activities
(Knorr-Cetina 1999). These frequently occur in a setting, such as a kitchen, a
scientific lab, or a courtroom, where the resources necessary to accomplish such
actions, with their distinctive epistemic requirements, have been gathered to-
gether to provide the infrastructure that makes it possible for particular forms of
work and activity within a community to occur. Such ensembles, which span not
only actors, but also generations and diverse semiotic materials, are central to the
ways in which human knowing is organized as diverse forms of action.
As the sedimented product of a long history of work by others grappling
with the question of how to systematically classify color, the Munsell chart did
not suddenly appear at the moment it was needed, but was brought to the ar-
chaeological field site as part of the toolkit to be used for excavation. The local
action depicted on the right of Figure 7.4 thus reflexively incorporates system-
atic features of the setting where the action is being performed (the toolkit that
organizes work at an archaeological excavation), as well as a history of relevant
work by anonymous predecessors. Such accumulative histories provide a sed-
imentation of ways of knowing which are relevant to the signature activities
of specific communities (Goodwin 1994; Hutchins 1995). They become in-
corporated into the epistemic organization of particular, local actions. Within
such laminated action, rich practices for categorization that are employed by
only a subset of communities, such as using the Munsell chart to classify color,
work seamlessly with more generic activities such as picking up dirt or other
objects, performing comparisons, etc. Human action is less a universal typology
of sharply differentiated action types, than a series of entanglements (Ingold
2007) that invoke, and accumulate through time, locally relevant webs of semi-
otic and social relationships.
This same process of building subsequent action by performing operations
on a public substrate gives human action an intrinsically cooperative character,
as each party builds upon structure provided by others. For example in Figure
7.4, Sue builds action by operating on the chart being held by Jeff, and he in turn
constructs his next action by operating on what she did: moving the trowel to the
color patch she indicated. In Figure 7.1, Chopper reuses, with transformation,
language structure addressed to him by Tony.
What is unique, generative, and creative about human communities (including
professions such as archaeology) is the richness and diversity of new forms of
action, cognition, and ways of knowing the world (classifying color by peering
through a Munsell chart, etc.) that emerge as humans transform the accumu-
lated possibilities provided by the materials left to them by their predecessors
into new, locally relevant forms of action, and frequently new settings (kitchens
and labs, for example) reflexively tied to these actions. As argued by Wittgenstein
(1958:§23) there are
countless . . . different kinds of use of what we call “symbols,” “words,”

“sentences.” And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but
new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into exist-
ence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (1958:11–12)
As eloquently argued recently by Heritage (2012), “the real-world distribution of

knowledge and of rights to knowledge” between participants is central to the or-
ganization of talk-in-interaction, something that “must operate for every single
turn at talk that embodies clausal elements” (Heritage 2012:24). As demonstrated
quite clearly by how the Munsell chart organizes the classification of color for
those who use it, the accumulative organization of action is both sustained by, and
makes possible, particular ways of knowing and understanding the world that is
the focus of a community’s scrutiny, e.g., enormously diverse human cultures.
Where archaeologists see the traces of posts holding up an ancient house, I see
quite amorphous color patches in a bit of dirt. Such intricate awareness of the
structure and possibilities for action provided by a particular inhabited setting is
given central theoretical importance in the work of phenomenologists. Thus for
Husserl ([1936] 1970:142) the lifeworld “is a grand theatre of objects variously ar-
ranged in space and time relative to perceiving subjects, is already-always there,
and is the ‘ground’ for all shared human experience.”
Cooperative Transformation Zones
The continuously generative variety of phenomenal objects such as categories,

words sentences, and language games, noted by Wittgenstein, emerges in part
from the way in which the intrinsic organization of mundane action provides a
crucible for the transformation into something new of the substrate a current ac-
tion uses as its point of departure.
All of the actions so far examined provide examples of cooperative transfor-
mation zones that decompose and reuse current resources to create something
else. In Figure 7.1, Chopper uses Tony’s own words to build a counter to what has
just been said. In Figure 7.2, Chil’s No’s indexically incorporate what Chuck has
just said to both reject what he proposed and, through lamination of prosody,
to characterize Chuck’s actions as inappropriate and lacking understanding of
what Chil is trying to do. By adding new prosody to the words spoken by Pat
in Figure 7.3, Chil transforms her neutral description into an assessment that
initiates a new sequence.
Both of the actions by archaeologists in Figure 7.4 provide cooperative trans-

formation zones that are central to the professional work being accomplished
here. Through structure-preserving transformative operations on a substrate
(indeed multiple substrates with the insertion of Munsell chart), the dirt that
is the focus of professional scrutiny is transformed into the categories, such as a
“disturbance” or a scientific color description, that shape archaeological practice
(e.g., how the field site will be mapped and described). It is precisely here that
“nature” (dirt itself) is transformed into the cultural phenomena that animate
the work and discourse of archaeology as a profession. Moreover, what occurs
here is but one step in an open-ended sequence of action organized through fur-
ther structure-preserving transformations on the substrate, brought into exist-
ence by the current work. The color category made possible by the Munsell chart
will be written on a coding form. The categories of phenomena, such as “distur-
bance,” now being located will help delineate the archaeological feature that the
student is tracing in the sand with her trowel; the shape that emerges from this
process will then be copied to an archaeological map. Both the maps and the
coding forms will be brought back to the lab at the end of the field season to un-
dergo further accumulative transformations, perhaps ultimately culminating in
a publication.9
Action uses as its input the structure and resources of a current substrate
and produces as its output a new, transformed substrate that will constitute the
point of departure for the next action, etc. Even individual utterances by a single
speaker demonstrate this accumulative organization through the way in which
emerging elements of a sentence do not stand alone, but instead require the sub-
strate provided by earlier parts of the utterance for their proper understanding.
New parts of an emerging turn can transform the way in which what has been
said so far is to be understood as action (Goodwin 1979). The pervasiveness of
cooperative transformation zones constituted within the midst of ongoing ac-
tion is central to the accumulative organization of human culture, knowledge,
and social life.
Human Tools
Human tools manifest the same cooperative, combinatorial formal organiza-

tion that was just described for language use. Tools are included in the present
chapter to demonstrate that the phenomena being investigated, such as the co-
operative organization of action, its construction from different kinds of re-
sources, accumulative mutability within cooperative transformation zones, and
intrinsic differentiated social organization, are not specific to talk, but instead are
manifestations of pervasive, general phenomena implicated in the organization
of human activity. As was demonstrated earlier in the discussion of examples

from archaeology, tools are also central to the laminated organization of action
through which knowledge in a community is constituted.
Humans have been defined, in a tradition that extends to at least Aristotle, as
the tool-using animal. However, it has been known for several generations that
animals also use tools. In Figure 7.5, A shows a chimp using a stick to extract
termites from a tree. In B, a Galapagos woodpecker finch is also using a stick to
reach insects. In both these cases, the tool being used by the animal is a single
stick. Both of these examples (as well as sea otters using stones to open shell-
fish, etc.) fall within Fitch’s (2010:154) definition of tools as “detached objects,
carried or held just prior to or during some goal-directed usage.” This definition
is important for what follows because it excludes phenomena such as termite
nests, beehives, and beaver dams, which are constructed through the complex
(though to some extent stereotyped) arrangement of different kinds of parts,
but which are organized on a time scale which is quite different from that of
local, emergent action.
It was noted earlier that Chil, and humans in general, build utterances by
flexibly combining different kinds of materials—lexical items and prosody, for
example—into a new whole. C in Figure 7.5 is from the extended sequence in
Figure 7.2 where Chil builds a range of different kinds of actions with the same
two words No No by laminating a different prosodic contour onto each of his
Animal Tools Human Tools
D
Stone
Leather
Thongs
Wooden
Handle
B
A
E
13 Chuck: Do you want me ta take that away.
C
Human Utterance
14 Chil: No No.
15 Chuck: Oh: you like it. Yeah yuh-
Figure 7.5 The accumulative combinatorial organization of human tools and

human action
utterances. The unique properties of each material make a separate and distinct
contribution to both the utterance and the action as a whole. What results is not a
single “thing” or indivisible, monolithic action, but rather changing contextures
of mutually elaborating phenomena organized as webs of relationships (Ingold
2007:75). Chil’s talk and human action in general are accumulative in that they
build from a substrate of prior resources, while constructing something new.
The tools being used by the animals in Figure 7.5 do not typically have this (ac)
cumulative combinatorial organization.10 However, as persuasively argued by
Reynolds (1993), human tools do. Though the sticks held by the animals operate
on something else in the environment (poking into trees to get tasty insects),
the tools themselves are not composed from separate parts (Goodwin 2010b).
They are not constructed as webs of interlocking resources which establish
relationships between different kinds of materials and participants. They do not
have an (ac)cumulative organization. D in Figure 7.5 is an ax constructed from
three separate materials: (1) a large stone, (2) pliable wood wrapped around the
stone to form a handle, and (3) leather thongs that tie the handle together tightly
to hold the stone. If the ax is disassembled, the ax itself cannot be found in any
single part in isolation. Without the web of relationships that link these separate
elements to each other to form a coherent whole, what one finds is simply a stone
or a strip of leather.
The formal properties of action and tool organization being noted here create
a space for systematic change within a framework that promotes the accumula-
tion of structure through time. For example, there are many different ways that
the head, the striking surface of the ax, might be attached to its handle: pliable
wood tightened with a leather thong as in Figure 7.5, cords alone tying the stone
to the handle, adhesives, etc. The task of joining the head to the handle creates a
problem space for experimentation through systematic variation. However, this
experimentation does not require that the complexity of the ax (or other action)
be focused on as a complex whole. Instead, the elements that are held constant,
the handle and the stone head for example, or alternatively the handle and the
haft if different kinds of hammers or blades are being experimented with, con-
stitute a matrix that can remain stable while variations in a single part are tested.
The formal arrangement of parts that constitute the tool or ax remains in place,
even as modification is occurring within that structure. Tools progressively dif-
ferentiate within the accumulative stability provided by a core feature of human
action, an organization that makes possible cooperative transformation zones.
The same is true for language structure. Through visible repair, a noun phrase
such as “my son” can be transformed into “my oldest son” and thus publicly
decomposed into differentiated sub-parts that permit optional insertion and de-
letion. These possibilities for decomposition and transformation are made vis-
ible to others with endogenous talk itself (Goodwin 2006).
In Figure 7.3, it was seen that Chil could build a single action by attaching
his prosody to rich lexico-syntactic structure constructed by another. More gen-
erally, utterances and turns at talk are built through the mutual cooperation of
speakers who provide talk and hearers who operate on that talk through visible,
embodied displays. Equivalently, when tools are built by combining different
kinds of parts, their collaborative social production by actors occupying alter-
native positions (designers in California and factory workers in China, for ex-
ample) becomes possible.
Though utterances and stone axes appear to be completely different kinds of
phenomena, and are indeed analyzed by entirely different disciplines within the
social sciences, as forms of human social action they have important patterns of
formal organization in common. Each is built by combining different kinds of
materials. This makes possible distinctive forms of collaborative social organi-
zation built through cooperative action as participants occupying structurally
different positions, such as speaker and hearer, or trading partners, contribute
different parts to the combinatorial arrangement required to build a single utter-
ance, turn at talk, tool, or object. These utterances and/or objects thus constitute
the nexus for extended, enduring webs of social relationships, and sites for accu-
mulative change.
Building Epistemically Competent Actors

through Cooperative Action
To build action cooperatively, participants must know and understand each

other, and the activities they are pursuing together, in ways that make possible
the further development of those activities. Distributions of knowledge not
only are built into the basic structure of many forms of human action, but also
change in ways that are consequential as action unfolds (Goodwin 1979, 1980;
Heritage 2012). Forms of knowing within the organization of human action are
thus organized as a dynamic ecology. As noted previously in the discussion of
the Munsell chart, this ecology includes the historical sedimentation of ways of
knowing developed by predecessors. This shapes both how diverse communi-
ties know the world that is the focus of their action in very different ways, and
the types of action that can be performed, as new ways of action (e.g., classifying
color through use of a Munsell chart) emerge.
The ability to create through practice the meaningful actions and objects that
animate work, knowledge, and discourse within specific communities requires
that one be a competent member of that community. The cooperative transfor-
mation zone where the Munsell chart is used as a component of professional
practice is not only the place where the dirt being excavated is transformed into
archaeological data. It is also the site where participation in the activity helps
transform new students into skilled, competent archaeologists (Mogk and
Goodwin 2012) who have mastered the infrastructure of skilled practice, the
habitus (Bourdieu 1977), required to build the signature actions that constitute
the work of their community. Social learning, or more narrowly pedagogy, is as
unique a human adaptation as language and the use of compound tools (Csibra
and Gergely 2011). With very few, very limited exceptions, other animals do not
explicitly teach their young. However, human communities are faced with the
ongoing task of creating new competent members.
Calibrating Professional Vision
Apprenticeship through cooperative calibration provides resources for orga-

nizing as social practice not only the actions being built by the participants, but
also skilled actors who can be trusted to see, categorize, and operate upon the
world in the ways required to carry out the actions that define the work of their
communities. Figure 7.6 provides one example.11
Sue, a young graduate student on one of her very first days doing archaeo-
logical excavation, is outlining the contours of an ancient post mold, visible as
subtle color differences in the dirt she is working with, so that its shape can be
transferred to a map. She is doing this under the guidance of Ann, the senior
Ann Sue
1 Ann: Enl-I would’a put it

2 a ti::ny bit out there.
3 (0.2)
4 Ann: But that’s no big deal.
5 Sue: Okay.
6 (0.5)
7 Ann: But do you see: *hhh uhm
8 (0.6)
9 Ann: Right there.
10 (1.5)
11 Ann: Okay.
12 Sue: I don’t see that one at all.
Figure 7.6 Calibrating professional vision

archaeologist who is directing the field school. Sue uses her trowel to inscribe in
the dirt where she sees the shape she is trying to outline. Ann then uses her finger
to lightly draw a second line, just outside Sue’s, while saying, “I would’a put it a
ti::ny bit out there.” This calibration of the exact shape to be transferred to the
map is made possible because of the way in which Sue’s line makes public the pre-
cise way in which she sees the feature she is working with. Her public inscription
provides a substrate that Ann can operate on with her subsequent line, which is
organized not as a new completely different action, but instead as an interpretant
of Sue’s. This process not only calibrates the actions and objects the participants
are constructing: the line that accurately depicts the shape of the post mold. It
is also helps calibrate, in rather fine detail, the skill and professional vision that
must be mastered by a young archaeologist if others in her profession are to trust
the work she does.
As described in more detail in Goodwin (2010b), Figure 7.7 depicts in a simple
fashion some of what is created by building mundane, consequential action
within a local epistemic ecology. What emerges, through recursive processes of
mutual elaboration that link situated practice to many different kinds of semi-
otic phenomena, is the cooperative calibration of actors, practice, communities,
and the intelligibility of a world being scrutinized. This is made possible by the
way in which action is constructed through the entanglement of different kinds
of resources which allow differentially positioned actors to participate simulta-
neously in the construction and calibration of action. Epistemic ecologies not
Skilled, Cognitively Rich The Distinctive Things

Mutually
Members That Make up the
Construct
Phenomenal Environment
Being Scrutinized
by their Community
‘That Disturbance’
Language
and Animate
Members’ Bodies
Its Work and Discourse
A Socially Organized, The Ability to see
Culturally Relevant Each Other’s Bodies
Sensorium in Just Those Ways
That Are Relevant to
the Accomplishment
of Collaborative Action
Figure 7.7 Building mundane, consequential action within a local epistemic ecology
only organize ways of knowing that are consequential for the distinctive activi-
ties of a community, and records, such as maps, of how the world is known and
operated on in a relevant fashion by a particular community; they also provide,
within the midst of mundane action itself, the cooperative practices required to
instantiate the community’s epistemic ecology as situated practice within the
skilled competence of new members. Acquisition of the practices required to
construct a map simultaneously constructs the relevant cognitive architecture of
the archaeologists who use such maps to do their work.
Conclusion
Actions exist as rich, temporally unfolding process. Individual actions emerge

from, and use, a consequential past shaped through chains of prior action,
providing current participants with a dense, present environment, a rich now,
containing many different kinds of resources that can be selectively decomposed,
reused, and transformed to build a next action, a proposal for how the future will
be organized. Thus human beings build action by combining diverse resources
(e.g., language structure, categories, prosody, postural configurations, the
embodied displays of a hearer, tools, etc.) to perform both simultaneous and se-
quential transformative operations on a local, public semiotic substrate brought
into existence by processes on many different time scales (from the immediately
prior utterance to the progressive sedimentation of structure in tools, languages,
and settings). To build action, participants must know in detail what each other
is doing, the kinds of knowledge each can accountably be expected to possess,
and relevant features of the materials, whether language structure, artifacts, or
features of the setting, that contribute to the organization of the action in prog-
ress. The way in which a single action encompasses different kinds of resources
makes possible (1) distinctive forms of social organization as alternatively posi-
tioned actors contribute different kinds of structure to a single shared action
(e.g., the talk of a speaker and the silent visible displays of hearer work together
to construct a turn-at-talk and the utterance emerging within it); and (2) the ac-
cumulation and differentiation through time within local cooperative transfor-
mation zones of dense substrates that create a multiplicity of settings for action.
Each of these must be inhabited by competent members who have mastered the
culturally specific practices required to perform the activities that animate the
lifeworld of a particular community. Through the progressive development of,
and apprenticeship within, diverse epistemic ecologies, communities invest their
members with the resources required to understand each other in just the ways
that make possible the accomplishment of ongoing, situated action.
Acknowledgments
I am very deeply indebted to Eton Churchill, Arnulf Deppermann, Cre Engelke,

Candy Goodwin, Anthony Graesch, Timo Kaukomaa, Adam Kendon, Per Linell,
Oskar Lindwall, Helen Melandar, Jeremy Kelly, Joe Manson, Numa Markee,
Lorenza Mondada, Chase Raymond, Fritjof Sahlstrom̈, Monica Smith, Jürgen
Streeck, Danjie Su, Akira Takada, Angela Tan, Daniela Veronesi, and two anon-
ymous reviewers for most insightful and helpful comments on an earlier version
of this analysis. I owe a great debt to Gail Wagner, the students at the archaeolog-
ical field school, Chil and his family, the children recorded by Candy Goodwin
as they played on the street in Philadelphia, and the families who participated in
the Sloan Funded Center on the Everyday Lives of Families organized by Elinor
Ochs for allowing actual events in their lives to be recorded.
My debt to all those who have taken the time to make such insightful comments
is deep and genuine. It is not just that I am responsible for the problems that re-
main, but rather that within the limits of this chapter I cannot adequately explore
the richness of what they have given me.
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8
Sex and the Sociological Dope
Garfinkel’s Intervention into the Emerging
Disciplines of Sex/Gender
Kristen Schilt
Introduction
Harold Garfinkel’s case study of “Agnes,” a young woman assigned male at birth
who sought medical treatment at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA), in the late 1950s, is widely characterized as the first sociological case
study of a person who might today identify as transgender (Connell 2009).
Published as the fifth chapter of his book Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel
1967), this case study is a departure from Garfinkel’s previous work in both
its ethnographic method and its topical focus. Though Garfinkel would pub-
lish no further work in this area, his theoretical insights about what he termed
“sex status” would come to anchor an ethnomethodological theory of gender
as a social, interactional production introduced by Suzanne Kessler and Wendy
McKenna (1978) and further developed by Candace West and Don Zimmerman
(1987).1 As theoretical paradigms about sex and gender developed and shifted
in the following decades, a continued interest in the significance of Agnes—first
as an illustration of a sociological concept, and later as a historical account of
a transitioning person navigating a regulatory medical institution—would gen-
erate myriad reinterpretations of Garfinkel’s analysis.2
While scholars have written both critically and appreciatively about the
meaning of Garfinkel’s case study of Agnes for psychoanalysis, queer theory,
feminist sociology, and transgender studies (see, e.g., Denzin 1990; Namaste
2000; Raby 2000; Rogers 1992; Spade 2006), there has been less scholarly atten-
tion to locating his theoretical insights from this work within the context of the
social sciences in the late 1950s and early 1960s (see Connell 2009; or Sassatelli
2007 for an exception). Drawing on published works and archival materials
from the Garfinkel Archives in Newburyport, Massachusetts,3 I situate this area
of his work within the then-dominant strands of sociological and psychoana-
lytic thinking about sex and gender. In particular, I focus on the distinctive so-
ciological—or, more precisely for the time period, ethnomethodological—lens
Sex and the Sociological Dope 215
through which Garfinkel interpreted Agnes’s life history. To highlight what I see
as his intervention into the emerging disciplines of sex and gender, I examine
Garfinkel’s writings alongside those of psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller, his collabo-
rator on Agnes’s case.
Stoller and Garfinkel coauthored two articles about Agnes’s case, and pro-
duced their own solo-authored analyses. Yet, as I argue in this chapter, they
approached this shared endeavor with different, and sometimes conflicting,
guiding theories and empirical questions. Stoller, widely considered a pioneer in
the study of psychological and biological “sex disorders” (Meyerowitz 2002), fo-
cused on the etiology, or why, of Agnes’s case. In contrast, Garfinkel was invested
in documenting the how of Agnes’s life—in particular, how she navigated her
everyday interactions as a woman without the biographical history and genital
configuration others assumed her to have on the basis of her appearance. Moving
the focus from etiology to interaction, he extrapolates from his interviews with
Agnes a general theoretical proposition that all people, even the “culturally de-
fined population of normally sexed persons” (Garfinkel 1960a:37), engage in
routine, interactional work to achieve their status as men or women on the basis
of appearance and behavior cues. This theoretical insight imagined sex status as a
contingent achievement accomplished in social interaction, rather than a static,
biological outcome derived from chromosomal and hormonal configurations—
the dominant understanding of sex status at the time. Though Garfinkel
(1960a:49) omitted some of his more cutting critiques of what he viewed as the
“impoverished” state of theorizing about sex status in the social sciences from his
later published work, his 1960 drafts that I examine here show a line of thinking
about sex and gender that would find echoes in 1980s post-structuralist theories
of gender performativity (see Moloney and Fenstermaker 2002; Sassatelli 2007).
And, while a radical idea for many sociologists at the time (see Sassatelli 2007),
his writings about sex status would come to inform the feminist theory of “doing
gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987), an explanatory framework for under-
standing the persistence of gender inequality that generated seismic shifts in so-
ciological thinking about sex and gender (Jurik and Siemsen 2009).
University of California at Los Angeles, 1958: An

Interdisciplinary Collaboration
In 1958, Robert J. Stoller, a 34-year-old professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was

running a study on biological “sex disorders,” or what he termed “intersex
conditions,” which Agnes entered as a potential research subject. For Stoller
and his colleagues, intersex referred to a set of chromosomal and metabolic
conditions that could manifest for some patients as a conflict between their
psychological gender identities and their primary and secondary sex character-
istics. At first glance, Agnes had all the typical indicators of such a condition. She
had been classified as male at birth on the basis of her external genital configu-
ration, and had been raised as a boy. Yet, by her own account, she had sponta-
neously begun to develop breasts at the age of 12. She reported that this breast
development further solidified her long-standing sense of herself as female. In
her late teenage years, she moved away from her hometown and started a new
life as a young woman in Los Angeles. Now 19, Agnes had sought out Stoller, the
West Coast expert on intersex conditions, on the advice of another physician. She
hoped to receive confirmation of an intersex condition and to be recommended
for vaginoplasty—a surgery that she felt would bring her genitals in line with her
gender identity (Garfinkel 1967). UCLA was one of the few US hospitals that
performed what was then a rare and widely disputed surgery (Meyerowitz 2002).
While Stoller had a great deal of experience with intersex conditions, he could
not provide a firm diagnosis for Agnes in their initial meetings. He found her
ability to live her life as a woman for the past two years notable, stating in his first
medical journal article about her case: “The most remarkable thing about the
patient’s appearance when she was first seen by us was that it was not possible
for any of the observers, including those who knew about her anatomic state,
to identify her as anything but a young woman” (Stoller, Garfinkel, and Rosen
1960:44). Indicating his assessment that her femininity did not come across as
a purposeful performance, he added: “there was nothing garish, outstanding, or
abnormally exhibitionist in her attire, nor was there any hint of poor taste or that
the patient was ill at ease in her clothes (as is so frequently seen with transvestites
and women with disturbances in sexual identification)” (Stoller et al. 1960:44).
Yet, while Agnes’s preliminary medical tests confirmed her breast development
and elevated estrogen levels, she had the chromosomal configuration and repro-
ductive system of a “normal” male. Without evidence for the typical indicators
of an intersex condition, Stoller’s team had to consider whether Agnes could be
taking an undisclosed source of external estrogen to simulate an intersex condi-
tion in order to access genital surgery—though they found it unlikely that she
could, at the age of 12, have had the knowledge about or the access to synthetic
estrogen (Stoller et al. 1960).
Establishing a firm etiology was crucial for Stoller’s research and for his treat-
ment recommendations. If Agnes had a verifiable intersex condition, and the
team determined that her internal sense of herself as a woman could not be
changed through therapy, she could be recommended for genital surgery as a cor-
rective intervention. However, if she were found to be taking an external source
of estrogen to induce breast development, she would be classified as having a
psychological “sex disorder,” such as what was then termed “transsexualism.”
In the late 1950s, the appropriate treatment for patients classified as transsexual
was widely debated by psychiatrists, medical doctors, and endocrinologists

(Meyerowitz 2002). As Stoller (1968) considered transsexualism to stem from
dysfunctional family dynamics, he recommended in these cases psychother-
apeutic interventions designed to help patients reconcile their gender identity
with their natal sex. He and the UCLA Psychiatry Department took a firm stance
against surgical interventions for patients diagnosed as transsexual (Meyerowitz
2002; Stoller 1968).
Over a six-month period in 1958 and 1959, Stoller and his team put Agnes
through a series of physical exams, medical tests, and periodic searches of her
belongings to look for external sources of estrogen (Stoller et al. 1960). She
also participated in over 70 hours of in-depth interviews, half of which were
conducted by 41-year-old Harold Garfinkel, a recently hired assistant pro-
fessor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at UCLA. There is no
published record of how Garfinkel, a sociologist with no expertise in the areas
of intersex research, came to work on Agnes’s case. From materials I discov-
ered in the Garfinkel Archives, the answer seems to lie in his proximity. In the
mid-1950s, Garfinkel had applied for and received funding from the US Public
Health Service for a project about psychiatric clinical records (Garfinkel 2002).
A letter of recommendation for Garfinkel’s funding application from an anon-
ymous writer associated with the Department of Psychiatry shows an interest
in interdisciplinary collaboration. The writer notes that the department had
“for some time . . . been eager to have a sociologist work with our staff,” adding,
“with increasing emphasis on cultural factors in mental illness, the addition of
a research-oriented sociologist to the psychiatric team promises to widen con-
siderably the scope of our psychiatric research” (SF-81 letter, 1956). As a Senior
Research Fellow, Garfinkel was given an office in the Department of Psychiatry,
which brought him into contact with Stoller’s intersex research. That Stoller
brought Garfinkel on to his research team suggests that he shared, to some de-
gree, an interest in the possible insights that might arise from a sociological per-
spective on “sex disorders.”
Garfinkel’s interest in working on Agnes’s case, in contrast, likely stemmed
from his investment in finding empirical cases that could make visible “the rou-
tine grounds of everyday activities” (1967:35)—the core of the ethnomethod-
ological project he was in the midst of developing in the 1950s. Pursuing this
question in what are now known as his classic “breaching experiments,” for
instance, he sent undergraduate students out into the world with the mandate
to engage in social interactions as if they did not understand or share com-
monsense knowledge with others. Through these experiments, he sought to
document the “socially standardized and standardizing, ‘seen but unnoticed,’
expected, background features of everyday scenes” (Garfinkel 1967:36). Viewed
through this ethnomethodological lens, Agnes’s life history could be imagined
as a naturally occurring breaching experiment. Supporting this point, Garfinkel

writes in an early draft of his Studies chapter that Agnes’s “value as a research
subject consists in the ‘perspective by incongruity’ that her experiences af-
ford about the strange features of the ordinary sexual affairs of life” (Garfinkel
1960a:41). That Agnes’s case was about gender was incidental. In his written
work, he likened her case to other groups who had to manage consequential
secrets in interactions, such as “political undergrounds, secret societies, refugees
from political persecution, and Negroes who become white” (1967:136). These
comparisons underscore his interest in Agnes as an illustration of a general so-
cial process he termed “passing” (Garfinkel 1967; Stoller et al. 1960), rather than
any particular interest in sex and gender.4
After a six-month period of investigation, Stoller, Garfinkel, and a team of
doctors, endocrinologists, and psychologists made their final assessment in
Agnes’s case. While they could not diagnose her with any known intersex condi-
tion, they had been unable to discover a source of external hormones that could
account for her elevated levels of estrogen and her breast development. Agnes’s
feminine appearance and deportment further suggested to the research team
that psychotherapy would not alter her deeply entrenched sense of herself as
female. Stoller diagnosed Agnes with a previously undocumented case of what
he termed “pubertal feminization in a genetic male with testicular atrophy and
normal urinary gonadotropin” (Schwabe et al. 1962:839). On the basis of this
diagnosis, he recommended Agnes for genital surgery, which she underwent at
UCLA in March 1959 (Garfinkel 1967).
Why vs. How: Developing an Ethnomethodological

Approach to the Social World
While Garfinkel participated in the effort to objectively determine the etiology

of Agnes’s condition, his writings suggest that he was more concerned with de-
veloping an ethnographic account of her experiences. Examining Stoller and
Garfinkel’s individual accounts of Agnes’s case brings these divergent discipli-
nary investments—what I am identifying as Stoller’s focus on the why of Agnes’s
symptoms and Garfinkel’s focus on the how of Agnes’s life—into high relief. One
such instance of contestation is visible in the discussion of Agnes’s post-surgical
experiences in Studies. In this section of his chapter, Garfinkel (1967:152) inserts
a footnote written by Stoller that spans several pages and is unique to the book—
at no other point does Garfinkel bring Stoller’s writing into his solo-authored
account of Agnes’s case. Garfinkel explains this inclusion as necessary to shed
light on an appendix to the chapter that he wrote in 1966 just prior to the book
going to press. Contradicting this explanation, however, this footnote appears
in a 1960 draft of Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology chapter that contains

handwritten editorial comments from Stoller (Garfinkel 1960c). I suggest here
that it is likely that the footnote was included because Stoller and Garfinkel could
not reconcile their competing interpretations of Agnes’s experiences after her
surgery. Reading the text and footnote together, both authors agree on a series
of facts: after her surgery, Agnes experienced repeated infections that resulted in
a great deal of pain and required frequent trips to the hospital and extended bed
rest. Where Stoller and Garfinkel diverge, however, is in their explanations for
why Agnes also experienced a depressed mental state that manifested in crying
spells, weight loss, chronic fatigue, and mood swings—an experience that made
her feel as if she was “going crazy” (Garfinkel 1967:153).
Stoller documents his quest to objectively determine the source of Agnes’s
psychological symptoms through medical tests. Such a determination was
of utmost urgency for him. In recommending Agnes for surgery, Stoller had
asserted his professional opinion that her female gender identity stemmed from
a biological source and could not be altered by therapy or other non-surgical
treatments. Noting this, he writes in his footnote: “The operation had been
performed primarily for psychological reasons; it had been the judgment of the
medical staff that her identity was so strongly fixed in a female direction that
no form of treatment could ever make her masculine” (Garfinkel 1967:153-54).
Her post-surgical symptoms threatened the validity of this diagnosis and treat-
ment plan, as it seemed “rather strong evidence that a mistake had been made”
(Garfinkel 1967:153). For Stoller, if he had been correct in his judgment, Agnes
should not be experiencing despair but rather a sense of relief that her genitals
now aligned with her gender identity. In a paragraph of his 1960 draft of his
footnote that does not appear in the 1967 version, he acknowledges his initial
fear that he had failed to see in his evaluations of Agnes prior to recommending
surgery “an unconscious masculinity that could not take the removal of the
phallus” (Garfinkel 1960c:70).
For Garfinkel, why Agnes would be depressed seemed obvious to any
thoughtful observer: she was exhibiting a rational emotional response to a disap-
pointing, frightening, and painful situation. Agnes had anticipated that her post-
surgery life would bring a new ease in the world, as she would no longer have to
carefully manage her everyday interactions out of fear that someone would learn
about her genital configuration. When this relief did not come—and, in fact, she
had to tell more complicated stories to maintain her privacy—she became de-
spondent. She had told her roommates and her employer that her surgery was
for a relatively minor “female problem” (Garfinkel 1967:153), and now had a
hard time explaining the frequent visits to the hospital and the long recovery
process. Her relationship with her fiancé became precarious because he found
her mood swings to be unbecoming in a potential wife (Garfinkel 1967:153).
Further, she found being reliant on nurses in the hospital to be demeaning, as

she felt they looked down upon her (Garfinkel 1967:153). The enormous pain
that resulted from a series of post-surgical infections compounded her sense
of despair. Centering his account around Agnes’s perspective of these events,
Garfinkel describes her post-surgical depression as “severe” in a 1960 draft—a
qualifier that Stoller crosses out repeatedly in the text, suggesting an investment
in downplaying the degree of Agnes’s unhappiness.
In the 1960 draft of his footnote, Stoller summarizes these two competing ac-
counts, noting: “The psychodynamic explanation is that the depression resulted
from the loss of a prized phallus, and the sociological explanation is that the
depression occurred on the basis of a loss of social position because of the pa-
tient not becoming a socially acceptable female when she expected she would”
(Garfinkel 1960c:70). Ultimately dismissing both theories in favor of what he
positions as an objective, indisputable answer, he adds, “The actual fact should be
a caution: her depression was due to estrogen deprivation” (Garfinkel 1960c:70).
Examining Agnes’s physical symptoms, Stoller identified the mood swings and
the night sweats as symptoms of menopause. As the location of the biological
source of her feminization had never been determined to his satisfaction, he and
his medical team ruled on the basis of her post-surgery symptoms that the source
must have been in her gonads (Schwabe et al. 1962). After surgery, she experi-
enced a dramatic loss of estrogen and went into menopause, a medical condition
easily treated with estrogen therapy. As if to assert that this medical explanation
was the definitive word on the subject, Stoller inserts the word “menopausal”
into Garfinkel’s 1960c draft whenever there are references to Agnes’s depression,
and suggests changing the phrase “an unpredictable change of moods” to “a men-
opausal syndrome” (Garfinkel 1960c:68). Perhaps electing to maintain a focus
on Agnes’s perspective of these events, Garfinkel does not make these suggested
changes in his 1967 text. It is likely that for him, diagnosing Agnes’s post-surgical
depression as the result of a hormone imbalance did not change the meaning that
this unexpected and negative turn of events held for Agnes.
As readers who are familiar with Studies in Ethnomethodology know, Stoller
turned out only to be partially right in his medical evaluation of the situation. In
1966, Agnes returned to UCLA with some subsequent questions about her sur-
gery. In this meeting, she told Stoller that her feminization at puberty had come
from an external source. At the age of 12, in the hope that the pills would help her
to physically manifest her female gender identity (Garfinkel 1967:287), Agnes
began to take synthetic estrogen that had been prescribed to her mother after a
hysterectomy. She had experienced a loss of estrogen after surgery, but only be-
cause she had ceased to take these pills. Stoller (1968) reclassified her as a case
of transsexuality, and had to recant his published findings about her unique in-
tersex condition. Garfinkel merely added a short appendix to his Studies chapter,
noting this development and suggesting that he would write a follow-up article
that reanalyzed his case material in light of this new information. That he never
wrote such an article suggests that a follow-up ultimately was not necessary for
advancing his ethnomethodological project. While the empirical facts of Agnes’s
life had shifted with her disclosure—the source, or why, of her feminization was
external, not biological—the theoretical importance Garfinkel located in the how
of Agnes’s life, namely her ability to navigate everyday interactions as a woman
prior to her surgery, remained unchanged.
Sex Roles and Cultural Dopes: Theorizing Sex Status as an

Interactional Achievement
While Garfinkel’s approach to Agnes’s case conflicted at times with Stoller’s con-
cern with etiology and diagnostic criteria, it was in keeping with the central
tenets of an ethnomethodological approach to the social world laid out in the
first chapter of Studies in Ethnomethodology. As Garfinkel (1967:1) notes, such an
approach warrants close attention to “the activities whereby members produce
and manage settings of organized everyday affairs” and how they make them ac-
countable, or observable and reportable. In the majority of chapters in Studies,
Garfinkel (1967:1) makes his theoretical points by drawing on a wide variety of
empirical cases that bring the kind of attention “usually accorded to extraordi-
nary events” to “the most commonplace activities of daily life.” In 1967, Agnes’s
case appeared to some readers to be more in line with the extraordinary rather
than the mundane or everyday—a fact underscored in a particularly critical re-
view of Studies by prominent sociologist James Coleman that focused almost ex-
clusively on discrediting Garfinkel’s writings about Agnes (Sassatelli 2007). Yet,
for Garfinkel, the significance of Agnes’s case did not lie in her rare, and for some
readers, spectacular condition. Rather, his interest was in her perspective as a
“practical methodologist” (Garfinkel 1967) who could, by virtue of her life his-
tory, illuminate the everyday reality of sex status—a phenomenon understood by
scholars and laypersons to be among the most involuntary, the most mundane,
and the most natural facts of life.
Drawing on his interviews with Agnes, Garfinkel develops a set of taken-for-
granted or natural attitudes about sex and gender that operate at the level of the
commonsense and to which he argues that all members of society are account-
able—namely, that there are only two possible sex statuses, male or female, and
that assignment to one or the other of these statuses is natural, inevitable, and
invariant. He theorizes, in contrast, that much of what is taken to be a natural fact
about sex status is made possible in everyday practice because of an assumed,
interactional trust in facets of a shared reality, including the gender of any given
person. Supporting this point, he argues that Agnes’s feminine appearance and
behavior were sufficient criteria for her to achieve her desired gender identity as
a woman in most social interactions and settings because people had a shared
trust in a reality in which gendered appearance reflected the “biological facts” of
sex status. In 1960 drafts, he expands upon this idea, noting:
We have already seen that physical evidences are critical as socially employed
insignia. But like signs-in-a-language, these are insignia in an order of cultural
knowledge of sexuality. Culturally one can be counted a member of the popula-
tion of normally sexed persons with or without the actual possession of biolog-
ically appropriate organs. (Garfinkel 1960a:39–40)
He adds, “This is not to say that the organ is irrelevant, no more than the phys-
ical characteristics of an utterance are irrelevant to the recognition by a language
user of ‘the thing that the talker is talking about.’ But the utterance is to the word
as the biological penis is to the culturally ‘sexed person’ ” (Garfinkel 1960a:40).5
Within these passages, he begins to build a theory of sex status as an interactional
achievement.
Extrapolating from Agnes’s case, Garfinkel next considers what it would mean
to make sex status in general (e.g., not just for people with “sex disorders”) into
a sociological object of study. Within the social sciences in the early 1960s, such
an agenda would be radical. Sex role theory, the then-dominant paradigm in so-
ciology, took the structural functionalist idea that people learn and come to in-
habit socially mediated scripts, such as “the doctor” or “the housewife,” as the
starting point for making sense of gender difference.6 In this framework, most
sociologists imagined “male” and “female” to be invariant, ascribed statuses
that people were born into, while sex roles, such as “husband” or “mother,” were
achieved, or socially attained, statuses. Theoretical work on sex roles was heavily
influenced by psychological theories of child development that emphasized the
importance of the heterosexual, nuclear family for socializing boys and girls
into their appropriate and complementary sex roles, such as the “wife role” for
women or the “husband role” for men (see, e.g., Parsons 1942; see Connell 1987
for a critique of sex role theory). Sex status, in contrast, received little sociolog-
ical attention because it was viewed as natural rather than social.
The psychiatric work on “sex disorders” that Stoller and others were devel-
oping in the 1950s and 1960s had a great deal of overlap with sex role theory.
As a psychoanalyst, Stoller put an emphasis on family dynamics, particularly
the relationship between the mother and child, in creating what he classified as
psychological disorders of gender and sexual identity. From this disciplinary
perspective, only through studying the “dysfunctional” case could doctors deter-
mine how best to achieve “normal” development. In Sex & Gender, Stoller (1968)
draws on his case studies of patients he diagnosed as intersex, homosexual, or

transsexual to build the conceptual distinction for which he would become most
known: a split between a person’s sex—which he viewed as determined by bio-
logical forces—and a person’s gender identity—which he viewed as shaped by the
early childhood environment of the family.7 Though this distinction separated
sex and gender, it maintained the underlying logic of a natural/social binary
embedded in sex roles theory.
In a draft of his conclusion for his Agnes chapter in Studies that dates to the
early 1960s, Garfinkel offers a sharp critique of the existing social scientific
models for understanding sex status. In a long passage,8 he notes that “in most
of the available discussions of sex roles the person is portrayed as one or an-
other kind of dope” (Garfinkel 1960a:41). He goes on to detail the types of dopes
located within the then-dominant grand theories of social life: the “game dope,”
created by rational choice theorists, who “knows the rules of normal sexuality
prior to encountering the occasions under which they apply” and to whom “the
rules furnish the alternatives to be chosen”; the “psychological dope,” created by
Freudian psychoanalysis, whose possibilities are “fixed early in life by the social
structures of the childhood family”; the “biological dope,” assumed by layper-
sons and researchers alike to be “after all one sex or the other by the surplus that
remains in the appropriate column when the signs are arithmetically evaluated”;
and the “sociological dope,” created by structural functionalism, “for whom so-
ciety is a table or organization such that ‘positions’ and ‘statuses’ are assigned
and enforced” (Garfinkel 1960c:41–42). At the end of this list, he quips, “I do not
mean thereby to criticize the use of models. I do mean to be critical of available
models” (Garfinkel 1960c:42).
And what does Garfinkel offer in lieu of these sexual dopes? He argues that the
understanding among social scientists that sex status is ascribed means that only
people who are considered to have “sex disorders” become positioned as objects
of inquiry (and, often, targets of intervention). He suggests that for laypeople and
sociologists, in contrast, “gender normals” are unproblematic: “There is a sense
in which the fact that one is male or female is, so to speak, ‘nothing to brag about.’
By virtue of natural assignment, it carries the sense of being outside of the deci-
sion or efforts of persons to do anything about it” (Garfinkel 1960a:35; 1960b:35).
While men and women face social pressure to embody cultural expectations for
their sex—being a “man’s man” or demonstrating feminine deference, respec-
tively—their status as male or female is commonly understood to be a product of
nature rather than willful election. Garfinkel (1960c:116) questions this assump-
tion, noting: “after having contact with an intersexed [sic] person, I came to see
that ‘normals’ are more aware and directed toward the management of sex status
than suspected.” Arguing that researchers must move past a focus on “mere di-
agnosis” (Garfinkel 1960b:99) in regard to sex status research—a small quip
seemingly aimed at the etiological fixation he encountered in the Department

of Psychiatry—he asks what it would mean to take “ ‘normally’ sexed persons as
well as our patient [e.g., Agnes]” as “cultural objects in perceived environments”
(Garfinkel 1960b:115). Within these passages, he collapses the distinction be-
tween “normals” and the “disordered” that were so central to Stoller’s investiga-
tory project.
Garfinkel further suggests that seeing sex as an ascribed status leads to de-
ficient accounts of the everyday realities of sex and gender. He argues that
researchers emphasize “the work of sex role activities as living up to the standards
of the parents” when they should focus on “the work devoted to the achievement
of the claims for bona fide sexuality by reason of demonstrated competence in
sex-relevant performances” (Garfinkel 1960b:114). From this point of critique,
he calls for a new area of inquiry in sociology: “descriptive studies of the sexual
‘case of the real thing’ as a cultural phenomenon in its own right and in its own
terms” (Garfinkel 1960a:41). Dismissing the line between ascribed and achieved
that was at the center of much sociological research on sex status in the 1950s
and 1960s, he offers in its place an ethnomethodological model of sex status for
all persons as being directed by “achievement motives” (Garfinkel 1960b:114)
rather than driven by natural forces—a theory that shares much in common with
later post-structuralist theories of gender performativity (Sassatelli 2007). That
not all of these sharp critiques and theoretical insights made it into the published
chapter in Studies is notable, and suggests that Garfinkel might not have found
much support from early readers for his more radical ideas that stood to upset
both social scientific and commonsense beliefs about men and women, and
about the distinction between the normal and the disordered.
Conclusion
In his writings about Agnes, Harold Garfinkel pioneered a historically innova-

tive and uniquely ethnomethodological approach to sex status as an interac-
tional achievement. Making an intervention into the emerging disciplines of sex
and gender in the social sciences of the 1960s, this work challenged the then-
dominant sex roles theory in sociology and called into question the psycho-
logical distinction between normality and dysfunction. Reading his work from
today’s vantage point, Garfinkel’s use of Agnes’s life history to create a general
social theory about sex status can be readily critiqued for largely bracketing the
real world consequences, such as arrest, unemployment, and harassment, that
gender nonconforming people in the 1950s faced—and continue to face in the
historical present (see Namaste 2000 for a longer discussion). Yet, his prioritiza-
tion of how over why required him to produce a much more vivid and detailed
account of Agnes’s life than a traditional psychological case study of the time
period—perhaps accounting for why his chapter in Studies has generated a con-
tinued interest from scholars and laypersons that Stoller’s writings about her case
have not. These two aspects of his writings about Agnes—his theoretical insight
into sex status as an interactional achievement and his ethnographic description
of how Agnes navigated both her everyday life and the regulatory apparatus of
the UCLA medical establishment—would spark later generations of feminist
sociologists, queer theorists, and transgender studies scholars to develop his po-
litically neutral ideas into more socially informed theoretical frameworks aimed
at understanding and dismantling the social mechanisms that maintain gender
inequality and transgender discrimination.
Editor’s note: Kristen Schilt, the author of this chapter, is the co-director of the
2019 documentary short, “Framing Agnes,” with Chase Joynt, and the director
of research for a 2022 feature film of the same title. The documentary takes up
Schilt and Joynt’s archival research in Harold Garfinkel’s papers as a way into cur-
rent debates around transgender media representation and trans rights.
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9
Garfinkel, Social Problems, and Deviance
Reflections on the Values of Ethnomethodology
Darin Weinberg
Introduction
Harold Garfinkel’s inauguration of ethnomethodology was part of a broader

intellectual revolution in the social sciences. Along with Marxists, feminists,
symbolic interactionists, and others, ethnomethodologists took issue with the
scientific establishment, rejecting the grand theory and abstracted empiricism
that C. Wright Mills (1959) satirized in The Sociological Imagination. In partic-
ular, they rejected the then conventional marginalization of the myriad forms of
social knowledge, skill, and reason possessed by members of society themselves,
and their derogation in the face of scientific sociology. Indeed, they installed the
fine-grained analyses of members’ methods at sociology’s very core. Nowhere
were these revolutionary initiatives more vividly displayed than in the study of
social problems and deviance. During the tumultuous years of the 1960s, these
topics garnered unprecedented attention and controversy, creating a compar-
atively high profile and intellectually dynamic forum for the debut of ethno-
methodological ideas. Whereas the old guard had seen social problems as the
essentially mechanical effects of biological or social pathology, social disorgani-
zation, and anomie, ethnomethodologists showed that in fact the social produc-
tion, detection, and management of social problems and deviance exhibit a vast
range of hitherto unappreciated forms of locally negotiated discretion, subtlety,
and orderliness. This chapter traces the origins, expansion, and diffusion of eth-
nomethodological contributions to the study of social problems and deviance.
More specifically, the chapter provides occasion to reflect on whether efforts
to reconcile tensions within ethnomethodology between its own evaluative
and value-neutral tendencies may help us to better understand and overcome
the long-standing tensions between evaluative and value-neutral tendencies in
the sociological subdiscipline of social problems and deviance. Garfinkel criti-
cized important limitations in mainstream social science and cast ethnometh-
odology as “asymmetrically alternate” to it (cf. Garfinkel 2002; Garfinkel and
Wieder 1992). He noted the problem of the judgmental dope and the tendency

of sociology to not only lose the details but dramatically misconstrue the na-
ture of collective action (Garfinkel [1967] 1984). But he also insisted ethno-
methodology does not seek to formulate correctives (Garfinkel [1967] 1984:viii,
2002:121; Heritage 1984:140–41). I argue not that there is a contradiction in
Garfinkel’s simultaneously avowing these two positions, but that it presents a
perspicuous analogy for those interested in applying his insights to the study of
social problems and deviance. The sociology of social problems and deviance
has itself been fundamentally shaped by enduring debates between those who
seek to treat them as pernicious social facts that sociology might be enlisted to
remedy and those who seek to avoid correctives and to study “putative” social
problems and deviance more neutrally, exclusively as members’ achievements.
By examining the relation between Garfinkel’s two positions on the worldwide
social science movement, both in his own work and that of others influenced by
him, I argue we may forge a more nuanced orientation to social research as in-
trinsically socially engaged but nonetheless rigorously objective.
The chapter is divided into four sections. In the first I briefly review the histor-
ical development of social problems and deviance as a distinctive subdiscipline
of sociology. Since its inception, this subdiscipline has struggled with the ques-
tion of whether a genuine science of society is entitled to the moral preferences
seemingly required of campaigns for social reform. In this section I describe
these struggles and the ascendance of particular techniques for managing them
to positions of prominence in sociology. In the second section I discuss various
ways in which Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists intervened in the study
of deviance and social problems. Emphasis is given not only to the transform-
ations these studies rendered to our understanding of the topics they consid-
ered, but also to the transformations they suggested with respect to the craft of
social research on these topics. Particular attention is given to the relationship
these studies suggest between dispassionate analysis and the orchestration of re-
form. In the third section I focus on Garfinkel’s enduring legacy. This section
is organized around what have become three major themes in ethnomethodo-
logical and ethnomethodologically inspired research on deviance and social
problems: (1) the topic/resource distinction, (2) membership categorization
analysis, and (3) the ethnomethology of mental disability. The final section
provides some concluding remarks.
The Sociology of Social Problems and Deviance
Critics of the sociology of social problems and deviance have long been fond
of bemoaning the subfield’s analytic incoherence (cf. Best 2004; Spector and
Kitsuse [1977] 1987; Waller 1936). Such critiques have incited not only efforts
Garfinkel, Social Problems, and Deviance 229
to systematize this particular subfield but also efforts to systematize and thereby
legitimate sociology itself. Modern sociology, in the United States at least, arose
from nineteenth-century reform movements’ efforts to more effectively address
the social problems attendant to industrialization, urbanization, and moderni-
zation. By century’s end, these efforts had yielded an aggregate of investigations
conspicuously lacking in any unifying scientific framework. Would-be aca-
demic sociologists seized upon this disunity, professing a knowledge of the en-
during essence of social life to which they insisted the laity be held accountable.
No challenge was to become more definitive of sociology’s history than that of
reconciling its claims to a public warrant as socially useful with its claims to be
an integrated, holistic, and dispassionate science (Bannister 1987; Ross 1991;
Turner and Turner 1990).
Some have framed this tension as essentially one of transition. As soci-
ology moved into the academy, it gradually shed its commitments to reform
in favor of a value neutrality then seen as the hallmark of bona fide science.
Though there is certainly a kernel of truth to this framing, it risks overlooking
a crucial fact. Academic sociologists never actually forgot the importance of
highlighting sociology’s instrumental applications. Early analyses of social
problems in terms of social pathology and social disorganization were plainly
conceived as “value free” but nonetheless were cast as productive of clear-cut
recommendations for policy and social reform. By casting social problems as
symptomatic of structural disequilibrium, these studies sought to reconcile
scientific value neutrality with the idea that social problems are objectively
harmful and in need of remedies that sociology can provide technical assis-
tance in devising.
Of course, it wasn’t long before critics observed that the social pathologists
and social disorganization theorists had failed to transcend moral biases. Mills
(1943) famously characterized these biases in terms of the rural, Protestant,
and nativist predilections that many early theorists drew from their similar
social backgrounds. These biases were manifest, for example, in assumptions
that cities breed social problems due largely to their lack of the shared values
and informal cultural controls found in more “traditional” small towns. Such
biases resulted in both an underestimation of the problems caused by more
global variables like economic inequality and an overestimation of the problems
caused by what might now be called cosmopolitan culture. As funding from
private foundations and the federal government became more commonplace,
concerns about sociology’s biases focused less on its practitioners’ parochial
backgrounds and more on its co-optation by the American power elite (cf.
Lynd 1939).
But these concerns, incisive though they were, exerted minimal influence
during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Most sociologists proved
considerably more interested in fortifying their own scientific status and per-
ceived social utility than soul-searching interrogations of their complicity
with power. Combining attention to structures of opportunity, mainstream
American and alternative subcultures, sociologists sought to draw attention
away from the putatively intrinsic biological and psychological deficits of rule
breakers and toward the social structural and cultural determinants of their be-
havior. These foci were shared between devotees of the two approaches Matza
(1969) was eventually to characterize as correctional and appreciative. While
correctional research tended to focus on the social strains that fostered deviant
adaptations and the remedies that might curtail them, appreciative research
sought less to change them than to more fully grasp the understandings that
disparaged groups had of themselves. This dichotomy between correctional
and appreciative research has sometimes been equated with the more general
divide between structural functionalism and the research traditions associated
with the University of Chicago, but things were not actually quite so tidy.
Functionalists, including Robert Merton, Kingsley Davis, and Daniel Bell,
highlighted the latent functions of activities like political corruption, pros-
titution, and gambling, thereby distancing themselves from correctional
agendas. If these reviled activities increased the stability of social systems, per-
haps correction was unwarranted. Moreover, many of the best-known studies
combined attention to functionalist and Chicago traditions (cf. Cloward and
Ohlin 1960; Cohen 1955; Erikson 1962). Much more consequential than spe-
cific theoretical or methodological quarrels were the more general questions
of whether sociology is, can be, or ought to be nonpartisan. As noted earlier,
reformists were largely marginalized during the mid-twentieth century. Hence,
both correctional and appreciative approaches were preponderantly cast as
correctives to the normative biases of past generations. The correctional per-
spective was shrouded in the value neutral pretensions of social pathology and
social disorganization theory, while appreciative research was defended for its
dispassionate attention to the worldviews of deviants themselves. Regardless
of their theoretical or methodological predilections, most sociologists were
fundamentally concerned to transcend lay biases by treating the beliefs and
practices of both normals and deviants as topics of, rather than resources for, a
morally and intellectually detached science (cf. Becker 1963; Finestone 1957;
Merton 1957).
Despite their self- conscious posture of value neutrality, appreciative
researchers, more than their correctional colleagues, fostered a more anti-au-
thoritarian and critical sociology by effectively devaluing the received preoc-
cupation with personal deficits among people deemed troublesome (Merton
1938:672). Though appreciative research like Sutherland’s (1939) differential
association theory of crime, Lindesmith (1938) on opiate addiction, Becker
(1963) on marijuana use, or Goffman (1961) on mental illness, was explicitly

devoted to objectively understanding deviance, at least implicitly, it served to
undermine the conventional wisdom that deviants are intrinsically defective.
By the mid-1960s, this more or less implicit critique of what had become known
as labeling evolved into a much more forthright and explicit one. This can be
seen, for example, in Becker’s (1967) famous presidential speech before the
Society for the Study of Social Problems entitled “Whose Side Are We On?”
wherein he bluntly renounced the myth of a value free sociology and endorsed
a more activist stance.
Becker’s speech proved a watershed moment. Gouldner (1968), among
others, criticized Becker for both too narrowly specifying sociology’s progres-
sive role and for too glibly dismissing the possibility of objectivity. Gouldner
represented a growing contingent of neo-Marxians who, without forsaking
objectivity, sought to displace ascendant scientistic and largely ahistorical
accounts of society with more fully historical ones. Not only would these ac-
counts take more seriously consolidated forms of economic and political
power, they would seek to reflexively situate sociology itself as a historically
contingent product and producer of history. This move toward a reflexive so-
ciology of sociology diminished the perceived gap between professional so-
ciological theorizing and the practical reasoning of lay members of society.
Sociological theorizing was conceived as an institutionalized feature of the so-
cial world, no less amenable to sociological explanation than was the claims-
making of anyone else.
Neo-Marxists recast the relation of values to sociological research. The no-
tion of a detached and value neutral sociology was abandoned, not in the name
of Becker’s pre-theoretical allegiances to society’s underdogs, but as a reflexive
regard for the sociohistorically situated interests intrinsic to theorizing in prac-
tice (cf. Gouldner 1970; Quinney 1972). Though they did much to discredit the
scientistic dichotomy between theory and practice, politically radical calls for
a reflexive sociology were themselves hobbled by both the narrowness and the
imprecision with which they construed sociology’s practical objectives. Not
only were these objectives usually construed prospectively as the objectives
sociology ought to pursue, rather than empirically as the objectives research
actually exhibited, but radical sociologists attended to sociology’s object-
ives exclusively as they pertained to rather sweeping specifications of human
emancipation. At any rate, by the early 1970s the sociology of social problems
and deviance had become largely polarized between those who remained com-
mitted to a scientistic image of sociology as value free and detached and those
who insisted that this image was not only inconsistent with the reality of social
research in practice but also politically irresponsible. It is with respect to this
polarity that the contributions of ethnomethodology are best appreciated.
Ethnomethodological Interventions
The pertinence of the earliest ethnomethodological studies to received research

in the sociology of social problems and deviance is difficult to miss. Garfinkel
coined the term ethnomethodology during a study of jury deliberations and
soon integrated the production of deviance, in the form of his famous breaching
experiments, into his own investigations of social order itself. In so doing,
Garfinkel took the study of rules, rule use, and rule violation to an unprecedented
degree of empirical depth and nuance. Whereas received research had cast rules
only as devices for regulating social action, Garfinkel’s work highlighted how,
by the active observance and invocation of rules, social action was rendered at
all intelligible let alone conventional or unconventional (see also Wieder [1974]
1988). Moreover, moral accountability was not occasioned only intermittently
when specifically moral rules are violated, but is an indispensable feature of the
coordination of social interaction wherever it is found. Some might argue that
by so broadly and diversely specifying the social relevancy of morality, Garfinkel
was instrumental in hastening the widely publicized death of deviance as a co-
herent subdiscipline of sociology (cf. Best 2004). But this was certainly not his
proximal influence on the field.
Though his early work was quite obviously relevant to the study of deviant
identities and trouble in dyadic and small group interactions, as could be seen
in the breaching experiments and his study of Agnes’s tribulations in passing as
a woman (Garfinkel 1967), the more decided influence on the sociology of devi-
ance in the 1960s was exerted by Garfinkel’s research in institutional settings. For
example, the fundamental influence of his work in psychiatric clinics is acknowl-
edged in two of the founding texts of labeling theory, Kitsuse’s (1962) “Societal
Reaction to Deviant Behavior: Problems of Theory and Method,” and Kitsuse’s
and Cicourel’s (1963) “A Note on the Uses of Official Statistics.” Both of these
essays credit Garfinkel with first distinguishing the social processes that produce
deviant behavior itself from the organizational activity that produces recorded
rates of deviance. This distinction was used in both essays to highlight meth-
odological challenges endemic to mainstream sociological efforts to statistically
correlate variables pertaining to individual personality, social background, or
regional locales with the objective incidence of deviant behavior. The study of
societal reactions was touted as an approach that circumvented these methodo-
logical challenges but nonetheless remained decidedly objective, detached, and
scientific (Schneider 2019).
Like the bulk of research described in the previous section, ethnomethod-
ology in the early 1960s was still committed to the production of a genuinely sci-
entific sociology. Drawing upon the philosophies of science articulated by Felix
Kaufmann and Alfred Schütz, Garfinkel, Cicourel, Sacks, Bittner, and others
drew fairly stark contrasts between the natural attitude of everyday life and the
attitude of scientific theorizing, common-sense rationalities and the rationality
of the ideal scientist. And they often cast ethnomethodology as an enterprise de-
voted to developing the latter (cf. Cicourel 1964; Garfinkel 1960; Sacks 1963).
Indeed, the very point of highlighting the distinctiveness of common-sense ratio-
nalities from scientific rationality was to better equip sociologists to more rigor-
ously analyze and appreciate their objective characteristics as organizationally
distinct from, rather than merely deficient versions of, scientific rationality. This
was, for example, a main point to be drawn from Garfinkel’s ([1967] 1984) “Some
Rules of Correct Decisions That Jurors Respect,” and his and Bittner’s ([1967]
1984) “ ‘Good’ Organizational Reasons for ‘Bad’ Clinic Records.” It can be seen in
Cicourel’s ([1968] 1995) book on the social organization of juvenile justice and
Sudnow’s (1965) essay on normal crimes.
The fundamental objective shared by these studies was, then, neither to de-
fend nor critique the various agencies they described, but to explicate their
distinctive and eminently situated rationalities. Hence, for example, Bittner’s
(1967a, 1967b) studies of peacekeeping on skid row and police discretion in
the apprehension of mentally ill persons both sought to critically highlight
the distance between received theoretical preconceptions of the mandates and
jurisdictions of police work and the concrete practicalities to which it is actu-
ally accountable. While abstaining from the critique of members’ practices, this
research certainly presented correctives to widespread organizational tenden-
cies in professional sociology itself. Mainstream sociologists were routinely
held to have undervalued the rationality of members’ practices by overlooking
how they were finely honed to the priorities and exigencies specific to them. But
these efforts to reform mainstream sociology were not held to be value laden.
Instead, as good Schützians, early ethnomethodologists adhered to the premise
that scientific theorizing is a socially detached, disinterested, and value neu-
tral enterprise unsullied by the practical interests and concerns of members.
Science, then, including ethnomethodology, remained idealized as a set of
techniques for transcending mundane values and interests. I will have more to
say of this later, but suffice to say for now that their Schützian commitments in-
hibited early ethnomethodologists from fully appreciating that their critiques
of mainstream sociology manifestly exhibited mundane interests and values of
their own.
Moreover, these Schützian commitments served to facilitate a radical, indeed
categorical, distinction between the practical worlds and objectives of members,
on the one hand, and the purely scientific worlds and objectives of analysts, on
the other. This distinction was often articulated as an enjoinder to professional
sociologists that they avoid confusing the topics of their research with the re-
sources they deploy in its conduct (cf. Cicourel 1964; Sacks 1963). In one of the
more emphatic and articulate statements to this effect, Zimmerman and Pollner
(1970) wrote,
Sociology’s acceptance of the lay member’s formulation of . . . sociology’s top-

ical concerns . . . makes sociology into an eminently folk discipline deprived
of any prospect or hope of making fundamental structures of folk activity a
phenomenon. Insofar as the social structures are treated as a given rather than
as an accomplishment, one is subscribing to a lay inquirer’s version of those
structures. (1970:82)
Zimmerman and Pollner here decisively divorce the lay understanding of the
social world as objectively given—that is, unified, stable, and independent of
people’s experiences of it—from a properly sociological understanding that duly
appreciates that the structures of the social world are collectively accomplished
in and through concerted practices. This position was also forcefully articulated
in Pollner’s (1978) famous critique of Howard Becker’s labeling theory. Pollner
took Becker to task for confusing sociological and common-sense orientations
to the labeling process. According to Pollner, common sense posits the objective
reality of deviance as independent of the societal reaction to it. By the common-
sense view, then, labels are distinct from the objective or real characteristics of
the people or behavior to which they are applied. In contrast, Becker’s sociolog-
ical orientation to labeling is ostensibly predicated on the culturally relativist po-
sition that different societies regard different sorts of things as deviant. Outside
the context of a particular society’s practices for sorting acts as normal or de-
viant, there simply are no resources available with which to determine whether
an act is deviant or not. Hence, societal reactions are not merely responsive to
deviance, they literally constitute deviance as such. The role of the sociologist,
then, cannot be to arbitrate whether labeling has been properly or improperly
accomplished. It can only be to analyze how members themselves orchestrate
such judgments.
However, as Pollner incisively observed, Becker slipped away from a thor-
oughly sociological orientation to deviance as invariably socially constituted
when he endorsed the ideas of secret deviance and false accusation. Insofar
as they posit an objective reality to deviance that can either go undetected
(secret deviance) or be wrongfully imputed (false accusation), both of these
ideas require the common-sense, and very unsociological, distinction be-
tween objective reality and the labeling activities of specific communities.1
Pollner called for a thorough divorce of the sociology of deviance from lay, or
common-sense, orientations to deviance such that the putative reality of de-
viance be construed exclusively as a topic of, rather than in any way a resource
for, social analysis.
This was precisely the approach taken as well by Wieder ([1974] 1988) in his
classic study of the convict code, where he noted the widespread tendency of
sociologists and criminologists to utilize, in their own explanations of inmate
behavior, formulations of a “convict code” borrowed from those they studied.
However, in so doing, they invariably dislodged these formulations from the
situated conduct within which research subjects had originally invoked them.
These decontextualized formulations were then assembled into representations
of the convict code as a more or less fixed set of values that determined people’s
behaviors and beliefs. In contrast, Wieder highlighted how his own under-
standing of the convict code was as anything but a fixed set of norms. Instead,
he insisted his grasp of the code developed provisionally and piecemeal as he
encountered its invocation under diverse circumstances. And his capacity to in-
terpret any given utterance as an invocation of the code was elaborated as his
understanding of it was itself continuously elaborated. In the following example
from his fieldwork, a resident asked some assembled staff members in a voice
loud enough for anyone else around to hear, “Where can I find that meeting
where I can get an overnight pass?” Wieder ([1974] 1988) writes,
On the basis of what I had already learned, I understood him to be saying, “I’m
not going to that meeting because I’m interested in participating in the program
of halfway house. I’m going to that meeting just because I would like to collect
the reward of an overnight pass and for no other reason. I’m not a kiss-ass.” . . . In
this fashion, I employed my collection of “pieces” as a self-elaborating schema.
Each newly encountered “piece” of talk was simultaneously rendered sensible
by interpreting it in terms of the developing relevancies of the code and was, at
the same time, more evidence of the existence of that code. Furthermore, the
interpreted “piece” then functioned as part of the elaborated schema itself and
was used in the interpretation of still further “pieces” of talk. . . . In this sense,
it is much more appropriate to think of the code as a continuous, ongoing pro-
cess, rather than a set of stable elements of culture which endure through time.
([1974] 1988:185–86)
This recasts the convict code as what Zimmerman and Pollner (1970) called
an “occasioned corpus,” not a fixed set of explicit maxims but an endogenously
crafted “self-elaborating schema” that rendered the halfway house as what
Pollner (1979) has called a “self-explicating setting.” This formulation served
nicely to exhibit the extent to which the convict code was shot through with what
Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) called indexical expressions, or expressions that de-
rived their meaning and practical consequentiality from the specific situational
contingencies of their use. It also served to highlight how ethnomethodology
might seek to make norms or values “a pure topic, in contrast to a resource, of
study” (Wieder [1974] 1988:40). By confining analytic attention to the work

that members themselves accomplish through such formulations, it appeared
one might systematically avoid the confusion of topic and resource. Norms and
values were not to be understood as causal forces external to and determinative
of members’ activities, but rather as constitutive features of those activities ame-
nable to direct empirical examination and analysis (see also Zimmerman 1970).
This orientation has become something close to an axiom throughout the ethno-
methodological canon, but has also been contested in ways I will take up in the
next section.
The foundational insights provided by Garfinkel, Sacks, Bittner, Cicourel,
Sudnow, Pollner, and Wieder have influenced a vast catalog of research on the
institutional production, detection, and management of social problems and de-
viance. Within present space constraints it is impossible to do justice to the many
studies that have incorporated ethnomethodological insights. However, I would
be remiss to neglect mention of at least a few. Durkheim’s Suicide ([1897] 1951) is
perhaps the best-known statement of the social pathological approach to social
problems ever written. By looking in detail at the organizational practices by
which coroners find of deaths that they are suicides in the first place, Atkinson
(1978) provides a masterful ethnomethodological counterpoint to Durkheim’s
blanket faith in the validity of recorded suicide rates. With respect to the courts,
there is an abundant literature on a range of matters, including the evaluation
of moral character (cf. Burns and Peyrot 2003; Dupret 2011; Emerson 1969),
question/answer sequences (Atkinson and Drew 1979), involuntary commit-
ment hearings (Holstein 1993), rape trials (Matoesian 1993), jury deliberations
(Maynard and Manzo 1993), plea bargaining (Lynch 1982; Maynard 1984), and
expert testimony (Goodwin 1994). Research on other organizations concerned
with deviance and social problems includes studies of the work of mental welfare
officers (Coulter 1975), police interrogation (Watson 1990), a work incentive
program (Miller 1991), gangs in schools (Garot 2010), family therapy providers
(Gubrium 1992), shelters for battered women (Loseke 1992), and mental health
and drug rehabilitation programs (Peyrot 1982; Weinberg 2005). While certainly
nothing close to comprehensive, this small sampling should suffice to convey
that research analyzing the details of interaction in agencies of human service
and/or social control is now a well-established, thriving, and widely valued soci-
ological enterprise.
But ethnomethodological concerns with language use, interaction, and
common-sense rationalities have also inspired another major line of research
in the sociology of social problems and deviance. These are studies that go be-
yond institutional or official approaches to attend to the unofficial forms in
which deviance and social problems are attended to outside the confines of in-
stitutional settings. Garfinkel’s aforementioned study of Agnes inaugurated
ethnomethodological research into the myriad practices through which prospec-

tive candidates for deviance ascriptions “pass” as normal during their everyday
routines. This initiative was given a more general cast in Sacks’ (1984) lecture
“On Doing ‘Being Ordinary,’ ” and has been noted as a technique for deviance
disavowal in various settings (cf. Rapley 2004; Silverman 1994; Widdicombe
and Wooffitt 1995). Pollner and McDonald-Wikler (1985) and Goode (1994)
showed how passing, or the interactional production of moral worthiness and
social competence, can be collectively as well as individually orchestrated (see
also Goodwin 2003). However, the more general tendency in the literature has
been to attend to the social production, detection, and management of troubles,
complaints, or problems as such, rather than their interactional avoidance.
Highlighting the widespread tendency to focus on official or formal labeling
processes, Emerson and Messinger (1977) called for greater sociological at-
tention to the informal emergence and management of trouble before it is for-
mulated as a particular type of deviance or social problem and/or comes to the
attention of official agents of social control (see also Emerson 2015). They noted
the ambiguity that often attends the preliminary identification of troubles and
the complex relationships that can emerge between definitional and remedial
efforts. Similarly, Smith (1978) and Lynch (1983) analyzed the informal inter-
actional dynamics through which members begin to suspect an associate may
be mentally ill. As Maynard (1988) observed, while these early studies of what
Emerson and Messinger (1977) called the “micro-politics of trouble” yielded a
host of valuable insights, because they relied on the recollections of interviewees
they were limited in the degree of precision they could achieve in their analyses
of the interactional emergence and management of troubles. Drew and Holt
(1988) wrote in this regard that while crucially topicalizing the role played by
complaints in reflexively constituting the nature and appropriate remedies that
putative troubles merited, Emerson and Messinger were not able to address such
questions as
how the recipient’s response might shape the formulation of trouble which
emerges from the interaction; how complainants seek to persuade recipients
of the validity of their accounts and hence of the justice of their complaints; and
how the extent of a recipient’s affiliation may have consequences for the organi-
zation of the activity of complaining. (Drew and Holt 1988:400)
Using audio-and video-recorded data, conversation analysts have introduced

considerably more precision into such study. For example, Drew and Holt (1988)
show how idiomatic expressions are used to formulate complaints and to elicit
sympathy from the complaint’s recipient. Pomerantz (1986) noted how what she
calls “extreme case formulations” are used to do a similar kind of work. Drew
(1998) demonstrates a variety of ways in which complaints are formulated to

highlight the deliberateness of the complained-of activity, thereby empha-
sizing its culpability. Schegloff (2005) takes the examination of complaints
even deeper by examining the interactional advent not only of complaints but
“complainability.” He observes, “complaining and the possibility of complaining
can inform ordinary interaction without an actual complaint ever being articu-
lated or otherwise made manifest in the conduct of the participants” (Schegloff
2005:451). This finding may very well prove fruitful in analyzing complaint
making and management not only in ordinary interaction, but in more public
fora as well.
A great deal of research has been done on what Spector and Kitsuse ([1977]
1987) call the “claims-making” process in the social construction of social
problems. One important element of claims-making is to effectively promote
and legitimize one’s stance on issues in the domain of public discourse and de-
bate. The third major strain of ethnomethodological research pertinent to the
sociology of social problems and deviance looks at discourse in the public eye.
This line of research was inaugurated by Atkinson (cf. 1984) in his conversation
analytic studies of applause in the context of political speech making. Atkinson
showed that effective political orators exhibit a mastery of certain rhetorical
techniques for inviting applause (and that occasions of their use tended dispro-
portionately to turn up in news coverage of the speeches in question). Heritage
and Greatbatch (1986) further develop this research with respect to a wider
range of devices for inviting applause in speeches across the major British po-
litical parties. Clayman (1993) looks at the practice of booing as a form of col-
lective disaffiliation, in contrast to the affiliation achieved through applause.
Ethnomethodological studies of the collective display of affiliation and disaffil-
iation with public speakers and their management by those speakers valuably
highlight the specifically interactional practicalities of both successful and un-
successful claims-making in the public domain.
Similarly, Lynch and Bogen (1996) analyze how, through the deeply stra-
tegic and politically charged interactions comprising the notorious Iran-
Contra hearings, a provisional and, indeed, multivocal historical record
of the social problem that was the Iran-C ontra scandal was forged. Moving
well beyond the now firmly established fact that history does not speak for it-
self, Lynch and Bogen analyzed television coverage of the hearings to unpack
the complex relationships drawn between truth and lying, speech and text,
memory, testimony, and interrogation. By ethnomethodologically attending
to the details of interaction, they achieved a level of ethnographic nuance
seldom seen in analyses of the social construction of social problems. Beyond
congressional hearings, a host of ethnomethodologically informed studies
have been done on a range of different kinds of mass-mediated programming
including news interviews (cf. Clayman and Heritage 2002), news conferences
(cf. Clayman et al. 2007), and radio and television talk shows (cf. Hutchby
1996; Tolson 2001). Focusing on topics including their distinctive turn-taking
systems (cf. Greatbatch 1988), the achievement of epistemic neutrality (cf.
Clayman 1988) and/or authority (cf. Raymond 2000), and adversarialism (cf.
Clayman and Heritage 2002), this research demonstrates at an unprecedented
level of empirical depth just how public dialogue and debate are collectively
orchestrated.
Garfinkel’s Legacy
In this section I take up three themes that have emerged as focal ethnomethod-
ological concerns in the sub-discipline of social problems and deviance. These
themes—the topic/resource distinction, membership categorization analysis,
and the praxiology of mental disability—each serve to highlight not only the
contemporary vigor of ethnomethodologically informed research in this sub-
discipline, but also the contemporary state of play in debates surrounding the
values of ethnomethodology.
The Topic/Resource Distinction
As was seen in the previous section, the admonition to avoid confusing the
topics of our research with the resources used in its accomplishment emerged
early in the history of ethnomethodology as an axiomatic precept. In its ear-
liest incarnations, this admonition was predicated on an explicit categorical
dichotomy between scientific and common-sense rationality and a strict adher-
ence to the view that the former must not be contaminated by the latter (cf.
Sacks 1963; Zimmerman and Pollner 1970). Whereas common sense was uni-
formly practical and driven by valued objectives, science was said to be uni-
formly theoretical, “value free,” and driven only by logic and observation. Sacks
(1963), among others, was acutely sensitive to the formidable problem posed
for sociology as a would-be bona fide science by the fact that it was steeped in
unexamined conceptual resources drawn from common sense, but he still felt
that this problem required solving. By the time he and Garfinkel had written
“On Formal Structures of Practical Action” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970), his
views had decisively changed. In the first essay he dismissed “practical [theory]”
(Sacks 1963:16) as an inferior alternative to science, in the second he and
Garfinkel insisted that both lay and scientific sociology are irremediably prac-
tical (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970).
Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) appear to resolutely disavow the notion that our
topics and conceptual resources might somehow be kept separate:
The fact that natural language serves persons doing sociology, laymen or
professionals, as circumstances, as topics, and as resources of their inquiries,
furnishes to the technology of their inquiries and to their practical sociological
reasoning its circumstances, its topics, and its resources. (1970:337)
Moreover, they insist that because no principled, or categorical, distinction is

available to distinguish lay from professional sociology, ethnomethodologists
must remain indifferent to the adequacy or error of all forms of both lay and
professional sociological reasoning and attend exclusively to the details of its
local accomplishment in any actual case; “persons doing ethnomethodolog-
ical studies can ‘care’ no more or less about professional sociological reasoning
than they ‘care’ about the practices of legal reasoning, conversational reasoning,
divinational reasoning, psychiatric reasoning, and the rest” (Garfinkel and
Sacks 1970:346). But because this refusal to “care” is plainly not equivalent to
the orthodox epistemological aspiration of scientifically transcending prac-
tical interests (Lynch 1993:141–53, 1999:221), one might reasonably ask what
the practical value of this methodological advice might be. What valued prac-
tical objective(s) does it serve? Their focus on indexical expressions and locality
provides good evidence that they did not imagine a generic answer could be
given to this question, that the value(s) of ethnomethodological studies would be
various, perhaps contested, and, in any event, dependent upon the local constel-
lation of conditions surrounding specific studies.
However, among the best-known invocations of the topic/resource dis-
tinction in the study of social problems and deviance, one does not see such
circumspection. Hester and Eglin (1992) insist upon a categorical distinc-
tion between social and sociological problems such that definitions and
explanations of social problems be treated exclusively as topics rather than
resources. This appears to resurrect the older generic and scientistic orienta-
tion to the value of ethnomethodological studies. Likewise, Ibarra and Kitsuse
(1993:29) categorically distinguish the practical concerns of social problems
claims-makers to “alter or defend some aspect of social life,” from the
concerns of analysts to produce a “theoretical reconstruction of the vernac-
ular features of moral discourse.” As Bogen and Lynch (1993:222) note, this
distinction seems to suggest, in opposition to Garfinkel and Sacks, that the
“analyst can somehow stand outside the commonsense world when investi-
gating its constitutive organization.” Ibarra and Kitsuse’s formulation neglects
the fundamental ethnomethodological insight that analysis is also invariably
socially engaged—designed to alter or defend some element of the received
wisdom—and as morally accountable and value laden as any other species of

practical action (Weinberg 2014).
To argue that the values and/or moral accountabilities of analysis might
somehow be categorically distinguished from those of mundane forms of reason
reifies essentialist definitions of analysis in contrast to mundane practice and
blinds us to the vast diversity of ways in which analysis, including ethnometh-
odological analysis, is both embedded in and accomplished through broader
social arrangements that both influence and are influenced by it. When Berard
(2005:7) writes of “disinterested description” as “a variety of description which
is not politically or morally driven, but rather driven by scholarly concerns, ac-
cording to which social inquiry should be governed by principles of empiricism
and logic rather than ideology,” he performs just such a reification. But as Jayyusi
(1991:247) writes,
Just as one cannot get out of language to talk about language . . . so one cannot
get out of the moral order in order to talk about the moral order. What does this
mean for the analyst? It means that she/he uses her/his moral membership, her/
his knowledge of the mundane organization of the practico-moral order as a
resource, even as she/he turns it into a topic.
Membership Categorization Analysis
Shortly after ethnomethodology arrived on the scene, labeling theory was

coming into its own as the predominant school of thought in the sociology of
social problems and deviance. Labeling theory promised to circumvent some
of the thorny problems attendant to distinguishing causes of deviant behavior
from causes of the measured rates of deviant behavior. It also highlighted, with
the concept of secondary deviance, the role that labelers sometimes play in fos-
tering the very problems they seek to remedy. Labeling theorists argued that la-
beling often increases offending behavior by forging what Goffman (1963) called
a “spoiled identity” among those labeled deviant. For a variety of reasons, the oc-
cupation of this identity predisposes those labeled toward further rule-breaking,
and those around them to anticipate further rule-breaking from them. This ana-
lytic frame was often articulated with reference to what Becker (1963) called the
deviant’s “master status”:
Some statuses . . . override all other statuses and have a certain priority. Race
is one of these . . . the fact that one is a physician or middle class or female
will not protect one from being treated as a Negro first and any of these other
things second. The status of deviant (depending on the kind of deviance) is this
kind of master status. . . . One will be identified as a deviant first, before other
identifications are made. (1963:33)
While intuitively plausible, this argument was more often articulated as a the-
oretical declaration than an empirical demonstration. Moreover, despite occa-
sional qualifications, it was usually suggested that the master status possessed a
universal relevance and consequentiality regardless of practical context. As one
might imagine, this suggestion did not stand up to empirical test. Research has
repeatedly shown that even the most salient of our social identities are only epi-
sodically, rather than universally, implicated in the myriad ways we behave and
are treated by others (cf. Schegloff 1987). Becker’s argument also left undecidable
which status was operative when two or more presumably master statuses (e.g.,
race, gender, sexuality, convicted felon) were potentially relevant to one’s anal-
ysis. Membership categorization analysis is a branch of ethnomethodology that
has brought unprecedented levels of empirical rigor and nuance to our under-
standing of the relationships among identity ascription, behavior, and belief (cf.
Hester and Eglin 1997; Schegloff 2007a, 2007b).
Through membership categorization analysis, ethnomethodological students
of social problems and deviance have demonstrated that, as a practical matter,
ascriptions of deviance and normality are overwhelmingly tied to specific cat-
egories of social identity (cf. Hester 1992; Jayyusi 1984). With incumbencies
in certain membership categories come sets of normative expectations re-
garding likely and/or appropriate activities, characteristics, knowledge, rights
and obligations. What is held deviant or problematic for an adult, a woman, an
American, a Christian, or a homosexual may not be regarded so for a child, a
man, a German, a Muslim, or a heterosexual. However, in contrast to the idea of
master status, no assumption is made that such incumbency is necessarily rel-
evant or procedurally consequential to all activities in which members partici-
pate. Nor is the linkage of specific identities and attributes treated as a foregone
conclusion. Instead, on any given occasion the practical significance of catego-
rical identities, as well as their linkage to particular patterns of action or other
candidate predicates, is treated as a matter for empirical analysis.
Membership categorization analysis has been fruitfully applied in a range of
studies pertaining to deviance and social problems, including suicide prevention
(Sacks 1972), police interrogation (Watson 1990), putative sexual assault (Lee
1984), plea bargaining (Maynard 1984), misbehavior in schools (Hester 1992),
gang affiliation (Garot 2010), ascriptions of “hysteria” in 911 calls (Whalen
and Zimmerman 1998), the diagnosis of developmental disabilities (Gill and
Maynard 1995), and a host of others. In addition to showing just how social
identities actually work in practice, this line of research also highlights an im-
portant aspect of the place of values in both ethnomethodological and other
types of social research. In the subdiscipline of social problems and deviance,

values are practically manifest when people’s putative rights are found violated
or their putative obligations found unmet. By empirically demonstrating how
in practice rights and obligations are tied to situated identities and contingent
social contexts, membership categorization analysis provides a potent method
through which science can be used to critically evaluate normative judgments
pervasive not only in modern society, but also in sociology itself. Too often both
lay and scientific claims about deviance and social problems are both asserted
and critiqued from vantage points that remain callous to the practical exigencies
surrounding them. Membership categorization analysis empirically elucidates
those exigencies and thereby facilitates scientifically grounded evaluations of
whether deviance and social problems claims-making is itself adequately atten-
tive to them. As will be shown in the following section, this is simultaneously
both a scientific and normative intervention.
The Ethnomethodology of Mental Disability
During the 1960s and 1970s, one of the most prominent debates in the field of
social problems and deviance pitted labeling theorists of mental illness against
those who insisted mental illness is an objective disability. Whereas labeling
theorists emphasized the influences exerted on people’s identities, behavior, and
life chances by psychiatric diagnosis and mental institutionalization, objectivists
insisted that the most important independent variables were those related di-
rectly to people’s mental disabilities themselves. This debate presupposed a stark
dichotomy between labels and realities such that mental disability was construed
as either a discursive social construction or a bona fide independent reality.
Ethnomethodologists rejected this dichotomy. Early interventions often looked
at the kinds of evidence members marshalled to support or refute ascriptions of
mental disability (cf. Coulter 1975; Smith 1978). Such research moved beyond
questions of how mental disability is socially precipitated and/or interpreted to
questions of how it is interactionally constituted as such (Holstein 1993).
Departing from the reigning preoccupation of labeling theory with secondary
deviance and the adoption of deviant identities in favor of attending to the prac-
tical details of interaction itself, most ethnomethodological studies have empha-
sized members’ competences in either minimizing or otherwise managing the
troubles associated with putative mental problems. Thus, for example, Bittner
(1967a) looked at police practices of what he called “psychiatric first-aid,” Lynch
(1983) mapped various “accommodation practices,” Pollner and McDonald-
Wikler (1985) and Goode (1994) showed how family members find competence
in the practices of their mentally disabled children, Goodwin (1995) analyzed
the achievement of meaningful communication with an aphasia sufferer, and

Rapley (2004) furnished similar analyses of those with intellectual disabilities;
the list could go on. As a corrective to the much more pervasive tendency in
the mental health literature to foreground incompetence, this research performs
the invaluable services of both showing the interactional contingency of mental
disabilities and encouraging people’s empowerment over their marginalization.
However, by de-emphasizing the realities of mental disability as affliction, this
research also runs the risk of undermining the putative rights of mentally disa-
bled people to special assistance (either from the state or anyone else).
An as yet less developed line of ethnomethodological research focuses
attention on the interactional constitution of mental disability specifically as
disability. Lynch (1984) looks at the interactional procedures through which
clinical signs of neurological impairment are made visible. Holstein (1993)
shows how, in commitment hearings, district attorneys used techniques to elicit
conduct from candidates for commitment that exhibited their unfitness for life
outside the hospital. Peyrot (1995) studies the situated uses of the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) to identify psychological problems.
Gill and Maynard (1995) critique labeling theory for its reliance on interviews,
after-the-fact accounts, and neglect of detailed ways in which diagnostic labels
become affixed to individuals by way of actual talk and social interaction in the
clinic. Maynard (2005) analyzes the interactional production of evidence of au-
tism through use of the Brigance Diagnostic Inventory of Early Development.
Weinberg (1997, 2005) shows how specific mental disorders were found in prac-
tice to have exerted specific causal influences on the behavior and experiences
of people in therapeutic communities. Each of these studies highlights how the
symptoms of mental disorder and indeed the disorders those symptoms indicate
are variously constituted not in people’s minds or brains considered in social iso-
lation, but in the details of ongoing social interaction.
More specifically, they show that people’s rights and/or obligations to such
things as work, mental hospitalization, social services, trust, or the forbearance of
their associates are in practice established not once and for all and with respect to
static legal, medical, psychiatric, or social identities, but provisionally through the
situated evaluations and re-evaluations of their myriad accountabilities, abilities,
and disabilities across the range of settings within which they participate. This is
a crucially important scientific insight with far-reaching ramifications for mental
health policy. If we are to claim that people diagnosed with mental disabilities
are entitled to special assistance, it is indispensable that we be able to empirically
demonstrate the nature of their special needs. The ethnomethodology of mental
disability transcends the contextually indiscriminate models of disorder provided
by medicine and the “psy-” professions to demonstrate the social interactional
constitution of disability across diverse settings. It thereby provides a far more
empirically nuanced linkage of specific disabilities and the myriad types of social
assistance they might be held to warrant (Redley and Weinberg 2007). Though fo-
cused in the first instance on the detailed scientific analysis of members’ practices,
this type of research also promises insights of considerable value to those seeking
to empirically ground mental health policy and reform agendas.
Concluding Remarks
I began this chapter by noting that ethnomethodology emerged in the early

1960s as part of an intellectual revolution that succeeded in toppling the scien-
tistic orthodoxy then ascendant and its tenuous aspiration to cast sociology as
a unified science. Sociology is, and indeed always has been, a heterodox enter-
prise comprising many different research programs, themselves composed of a
welter of often fragile alliances, competing arguments, and institutional patrons.
Moreover, it draws upon competing understandings of the relationship between
professional and members’ accounts of themselves and their social worlds.
Ethnomethodology, too, exhibits its own heterodoxy in this regard (Maynard
and Clayman 1991). While this by no means demands a relativist retreat from
debate, it does demand acknowledging that divergent scholarly judgments may
often reflect divergent intellectual interests and objectives rather than just the
comparative epistemological validity of our empirical observations and theoret-
ical inferences. In our now post-Kuhnian world, this is no longer the cause for
scientific embarrassment it once was (cf. Bourdieu 1988).
No longer is it scientifically persuasive to denigrate sociology or the soci-
ology of social problems and deviance in particular for a lack of analytic unity.
Not only has scientific heterodoxy become epistemologically respectable (cf.
Longino 2002), but the very idea that we might decisively demarcate the di-
verse species of scientific practice from those of non-scientific practice has itself
grown untenable. In place of the essentialist contrast between science and non-
science has arisen a recognition of immense local variations in how this line is
drawn and the commonality of applied science hybrids (Jasanoff 2011). This is
no less true for ethnomethodology. Ostermann and Kitzinger (2012) suggest
the growth of conversation analysis has produced a diversification of topics and
debates that do not readily yield to the distinction between pure and applied.
Instead, the debates and/or practical agendas into which we intervene are often
composed of a mélange of objectives simultaneously scientific, political, social,
medical, or otherwise. Perhaps it is now time to dispense with anachronistic,
essentialist, and dogmatic distinctions between fact and value, analysis and re-
form, and to appreciate that whatever we are seeking to accomplish through our
work, we will inevitably be held accountable to provide for the value of so doing.
This value will likely be assessed differently in different contexts and perhaps
by different people in the same contexts. But in any case, ethnomethodological
studies will continue to show, through the meticulous analysis of locally con-
certed social interaction, just how.
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10
The Ethnomethodological Lineage
of Conversation Analysis
Steven E. Clayman, John Heritage, and Douglas W. Maynard
Introduction
What is the relationship between ethnomethodology and conversation anal-

ysis (CA)? Textbooks and review articles have been sketchy on the ethno-
methodological lineage of CA, suggesting that Harold Garfinkel’s work was
an “inspiration” for CA (Sidnell 2010:6), a “major force in CA’s development”
(ten Have 2007:6), or that CA is a “special form of ethnomethodology” that
follows “Garfinkel’s policy of making the commonsense methodology of the
everyday world into a topic of study” (Button and Lee 1987:22–29). Heritage
(1984:233) characterizes CA as a “prominent form of ethnomethodological
work.” Its success, Lynch (2000:529) laments, has meant “having lost sight of
its charismatic origins” in ethnomethodology, although this can be regained
by maintaining “an orientation to singular instances of action.” In these brief
and sometimes critical comments, CA’s relationship to the ethnomethodolog-
ical tradition remains obscure and unexplicated. This chapter takes a closer
look at the scholarly lineage of CA and suggests something of a paradox: that
ethnomethodology was both a profound and yet circumscribed inspiration
for the development of CA, which involved a creative synthesis of certain key
ideas drawn from the broader scholarly ferment surrounding the work of both
Garfinkel and Goffman in the 1960s.
We bolster this claim by first discussing Garfinkel’s early approach to the anal-
ysis of lived experience. Ethnomethodology’s “origin story” or stories (Lynch
2007) have been told many times over, often by drawing on Garfinkel’s (1974)
own account of how the term “ethnomethodology” came into being in the early
1950s. We trace somewhat earlier origins to illuminate the milieu in which
Garfinkel operated and the grounds he was treading when still a graduate student
and formulating, at least in nascent terms, what would emerge as ethnomethod-
ology (see also Garfinkel 2002; Rawls 2002, 2006, Chapter 3 in this volume).
To anticipate the core of our argument: early on, Garfinkel was simultaneously
dealing with the work of Talcott Parsons and that of the phenomenologists, using
ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 253
the latter to address what he considered to be lacunae in the action theory of the
former (see Garfinkel [1962] 2019; see also Heritage 1984). Sacks, by compar-
ison, while engaging and briefly collaborating with Garfinkel, neither addressed
Parsons nor drew particularly from the phenomenologists, and ultimately
diverged from Garfinkel’s approach in important ways. Erving Goffman’s work
was another source of inspiration, but Sacks was as selective in his engagement
with Goffman as he was with Garfinkel, synthesizing certain key ideas from both
figures with those of his collaborators Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. The
conversation analytic discipline that emerged from this synthesis was geared
to advancing a simultaneously rigorous and thoroughly emic science of the
“witnessable order” (Livingston 2008) of human interaction.
Garfinkel and Interaction
The attempt to approximate some sort of precision in the study of

human conduct is not unlike the task of swatting flies with a hammer.
Apart from the fact that one must make the tenuous assumption that
the fly will remain still, one must be willing to settle for a low batting
average while facing the prospect of leaving the room in a shamble
when the game is done.
—Garfinkel ([1948] 2006:99)
This analogy, which Harold Garfinkel wrote in 1948, was directed toward the
social and linguistic sciences as then constituted in mid-twentieth century social
thought. A central assumption of that period was that everyday reasoning and so-
cial interaction are inherently disorderly (Garfinkel 1988; Sacks 1984). The social
sciences have attempted to use the hammer of social structures, invoking features
such as gender, race, and class as resources for explaining actual social conduct
(cf., Goffman 1964), but striking very few targets in the process. Linguistics, for
its part, whether in the work of Saussure, Bloomfield, or Chomsky, was premised
on the idea that spoken interaction is an impoverished and disorganized version
of linguistic competence, which may be discerned through grammatical analysis
centered largely on written texts (Harris 1981; Linell 2004). As Garfinkel, and
later Sacks, would see it, both disciplinary perspectives rely on relatively inert
tools—the structural “hammers” of their respective disciplines—that ultimately
occlude the processual realities of language, interaction, and social organization
as elements of lived experience.
Both Garfinkel and Sacks recognized this fundamental hammer and fly-swat-
ting problem, and the need for inquiries that are accountable to the indigenous
forms of organization that societal members themselves recognize and put into
practice, but their approaches were strikingly different. Briefly put, Garfinkel in-
itially used phenomenologically informed inquiries to gain access to the socially
organized world of everyday life, deploying incongruity experiments and further
forms of demonstration to expose otherwise-hidden methods of practical rea-
soning. Sacks, by contrast, was drawn to a more naturalistic style of inquiry and
a focus on non-contrived conduct in interaction, exploiting the affordances of
audio and video recordings to reveal the dynamics of action-production and rec-
ognition as it develops sequentially in real time.
In pursuing the analysis of everyday conduct, both Garfinkel and Sacks in ef-
fect put down the hammer, but the replacement tools they picked up were very
different and have yielded mutually sympathetic but ultimately divergent lines
of inquiry. To see how Garfinkel originated his own approach, we briefly review
a 1948 dissertation proposal, which adumbrated an initial interest in exploring
the domain of interaction. Although it represents a “road not taken” by Garfinkel
himself, it included an initial and highly prescient effort to grapple with the
context-dependency of meaning and action in everyday life. This theme would
later inform Studies in Ethnomethodology. Tellingly, it would also inform Sacks’s
treatment of the sequential organization of interaction.
The Concision and Flexibility of Language
The analogy about hammers and flies that we quoted earlier is from Seeing
Sociologically (Garfinkel [1948] 2006), a document originally designed as a
dissertation proposal. Although the dissertation project it foreshadowed was
never realized (it would be one proposal among several that Garfinkel assem-
bled), the document circulated in mimeograph form among graduate students at
Harvard and later among “several key thinkers,” including Erving Goffman (who
commented on it), Anselm Strauss, and Harvey Sacks (Rawls 2006:2).
Seeing Sociologically raises two original and fundamental problems bearing
on the intelligibility of social behavior, that would later gain increasing promi-
nence within ethnomethodology and allied approaches. One is the concision of
everyday speech, which always conveys more than what a dictionary provides.
As Garfinkel ([1948] 2006:105) put it, “One need only listen to what is actually
said between two close friends to realize that the heard speech conveys infinitely
more than Webster would have allowed.”
A second problem is related to what Garfinkel would later discuss under the
rubrics of the documentary method of interpretation (Garfinkel 1962) and in-
dexical expressions (Garfinkel 1967:4–7). He observes that, “. . . as far as the
problems of communication are concerned, any sign can signify anything in the
communicative universe. (Garfinkel [1948] 2006:106, italics in original). This
observation is not to be confused with the claim that there is an arbitrary rela-
tion between sign and meaning. Rather it goes to the import of any utterance as
a communicative action that achieves its status as such through its relationship
with context. With these dual problems of meaning—the concision of speech
and its context dependency—Garfinkel ([1948] 2006:144–45) was staking out a
social territory consisting of “actual experiences,” and “working acts performed
with reference to another actor,” which he characterizes in an understated way as
“a field that is practically unexplored.”
Parsonian social theory had failed to take these fundamental matters
into account, instead developing an “action frame of reference” and stipu-
lating “meanings” by way of pattern variables designating internalized value
orientations to explain so- called unit acts (Heritage 1984:20). In Seeing
Sociologically, by contrast, Garfinkel sought to minimize theoretical imposi-
tion by coming to terms with the indigenously meaningful experience of human
action when sign-meanings require expansion and adjustment in context. The
ensuing discussion will bring us forward from 1948 to other work on the docu-
mentary method of interpretation and on indexical expressions.
The Problem of Lived Experience
Thus far we have identified two fundamental problems that Garfinkel targeted—
how “heard speech conveys infinitely more than Webster would have allowed”
(its concision, for short), and how “any sign can signify anything in the commu-
nicative universe” (its flexibility, due to context embeddedness). Now we con-
sider how he evinced an early concern with social interaction, only to abandon
this topic in favor of common-sense knowledge and methods of reasoning. This
shift in focus is what would come to distinguish ethnomethodology from the
emerging field of conversation analysis.
In his concern with direct experience, Garfinkel referred to and explicated the
notion of “communication.” He was at pains to avoid the term “interaction” be-
cause in the 1940s it was associated with the stimulus-response theories of B. F.
Skinner (Rawls 2006:25). We will, however, use the term “interaction” because
it posits the radical priority of the actor’s immediate relations with others (Rawls
2006:179) over the self as the locus of meaning and order. Garfinkel’s ([1948]
2006:181) characterization of interaction encompasses, first, the “products of
communication” or “signs,” which include “occurrences of his speaking” as well as
“his own gestures” as they occur “in the space and time of the outer world” within
the speaker’s “vivid presence.” Second, besides speaking, listening, and gesturing
and their temporal and spatial constitution, Garfinkel ([1948] 2006:182–83)
introduces the matter of “style” or the “manner of delivery,” the ways in which
things are said, including “tone, tics, posture, physical gesture, inflection” and “au-
ditory coordinates” such as “pitch, intensity, and loudness.”
It bears emphasis that Garfinkel was working at a time when there were few
sources other than the phenomenologists, and particularly Schütz (see Chapter 2,
this volume), who could offer any guidance for the analysis of actual lived experi-
ence in interaction, including signs and their manner of delivery. However, these
phenomenological guides mainly provided for what it is that needs to be studied
and understood sociologically: the actor’s lived experience as constituted in con-
crete real-time interaction with others. As for how to do this, Garfinkel’s own ap-
proach would come to involve experimental manipulations of “incongruities” to
see what their effects could tell us about the background expectancies involved in
the lived structures of everyday life. This turn toward the underlying assumptions
and presuppositions involved in the structuring of everyday experience found
Garfinkel proceeding along a different track than that which later emerged from
Sacks’s focus on the in-course organization of interaction as displayed in real
time. As explored in Garfinkel’s dissertation, and in later writings about incon-
gruities, the devices for resolving incongruity are methods that experimental
subjects deploy in response to disruptions produced by others. Thus, we learn
about how subjects display their common-sense assumptions in response to in-
teractional disruptions, but we learn less about how these assumptions are inter-
subjectively managed within the flow of undisrupted and hence routine courses
of interaction (Garfinkel [1948] 2006:207).
In effect, having uncovered the deficiencies of social theory in dealing with
everyday experience (see Chapter 2 in this volume), Garfinkel could only make
the organization of such experience visible by disabling it. “Procedurally,”
Garfinkel (1967:37) says, “it is my preference to start with familiar scenes and
ask what can be done to make trouble.” The result of this trouble-making strategy
was to provide for the visibility of a substrate of trust that lies in back of ordinary
social behavior (Garfinkel 1963) without exploring the intelligible structuring of
the behavior itself.
Concision, Flexibility, and the Documentary Method

of Interpretation
This returns us to Garfinkel’s way of handling the two problems—the concision

and flexibility of speech—that he exposed as endemic and unaddressed in con-
temporary social theory. Since concision suggests that words-in-use will convey
more than their dictionary definitions, while flexibility suggests that words-in-
use achieve their intelligibility by way of their indexical relationship to in-use
contexts, these problems are two sides of the same interactional coin.
Papers from the late 1950s and early 1960s, later incorporated in Studies in
Ethnomethodology (1967), address both of these problems. Garfinkel succinctly
illustrated the problem of concision by way of a simple procedure in which he
asked students to write out an informal conversation of theirs on the left side of a
sheet of paper, and then to elaborate “what they were talking about” on the right
side (Garfinkel 1967:38–42). Participants had no trouble describing assumed
background knowledge on that right side and seeing that it was vastly more than
the (comparatively) meager amount of actual talk on the left side. However, they
began to find it irksome when Garfinkel persuaded them that their elaborations
themselves required further elaboration.
In the face of the participants’ inability to address utterance meaning
through literal or dictionary-defined description, Garfinkel (1959:57) turned
to Karl Mannheim’s (1952) notion of the “documentary method of interpre-
tation.” In everyday situations, routinely concise and at times telegraphic
utterances are understood in relation to a presumptively existing social con-
text. In Mannheim’s treatment, utterance and context elaborate one another
in a process in which the context contributes to an understanding of the ut-
terance, and in turn the utterance contributes to an understanding of the con-
text. There is therefore a reciprocal, mutually elaborative relationship between
utterance and context. In commenting on the “conversation clarification” pro-
cess, Garfinkel (1964:228–29) drew attention to “the role of time as it is consti-
tutive of ‘the matter talked about’ as a developing and developed event over the
course of action that produced it, as both the process and product were known
from within this development by both parties, each for himself as well as on
behalf of the other.” Indeed, regarding how one interlocutor waits for the other
to say something further to understand the significance of what had been said,
Garfinkel (1964:229) observes, “the sense of the expressions depended upon
where the expression occurred in serial order, the expressive character of the
terms that comprised it, and the importance to the conversationalists of the
events depicted.”
Garfinkel’s second problem—flexibility—is deeply related to the first, the
problem of concision. For if the meanings of words, sentences, and utterances
are expanded and specified by reference to context, then there may be no fea-
sible limit on the varying meanings that can be invested in expressions. A vivid
illustration is this utterance, produced in a telephone call in which the speaker
is reflecting on the losses stemming from a house fire: “I guess the hardest thing
is things that meant things. You know?” In this readily intelligible sentence, ev-
idently the word “thing” is invested with three quite distinct meanings. At the
level of action as well, utterances can be treated very differently depending on
whether the speaker is understood in context to be: “talking synonymously,
talking ironically, talking metaphorically, talking cryptically, talking narratively,
talking in a questioning or answering way, lying, glossing, double-talking, and

the rest” (Garfinkel 1967:29).
Implicit in Garfinkel’s use of the documentary method of interpretation is
what he would later characterize as the “reflexive” properties of natural language
use. If the indexical properties of natural language provide for the situated un-
derstanding of language in context, its reflexive properties refer to the fact that
language used in context elaborates the context it describes. Together, the index-
ical and reflexive properties of language use parallel Mannheim’s description of
the documentary method of interpretation as involving the treatment of a phe-
nomenon as pointing to or standing on behalf of a presupposed underlying pat-
tern. Garfinkel (1967:Chapter 3) treats this account of the documentary method
as a feature of reasoning in everyday life, rather than as Mannheim treated it, as a
particular scholarly method in the study of culture. In everyday life, as Garfinkel
elaborates, “not only is the underlying pattern derived from its individual docu-
mentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are
interpreted on the basis of ‘what is known’ about the underlying pattern. Each is
used to elaborate the other” (Garfinkel 1967:78).
With these observations described, Garfinkel (1959:59) had come closer to
the study of language-in-use as part of an effort to more systematically address
what he had mentioned, in 1948, about signs signifying anything.
Garfinkel and Sacks’s Divergent Approaches to the

Contextuality of Language
However much the concision and flexibility of speech sets an investigative

agenda for ethnomethodology and ethnomethodology- inspired endeavors
in the social sciences, the gulf separating Garfinkel’s approach and that taken
by Sacks and CA is nonetheless substantial. In the area of speech practices,
Garfinkel’s (1967:4–5) own investigations, although enormously insightful,
begin with “problematic phenomena,” among which are the “substitutability
of objective for indexical expressions.” In this light, he cites Edmund Husserl,
Bertrand Russell, and Nelson Goodman for raising the “properties of indexical
expressions and indexical actions,” and goes on to explicate seven ways in which
these properties are awkward, unavoidable, necessary, and so on. Indexicals
“motivate endless methodological studies directed to their remedy;” they “pre-
sent immense, obstinate, and irremediable nuisances . . .” (Garfinkel 1967:6).
His explication and investigations of the use of indexical expressions, however,
are for the most part retrospective textual analyses or astute observations about
sense-making methods and procedures, whether from the Los Angeles Suicide
Prevention Center, clinic folders in a psychiatric clinic, experiences of coding,
the work of “passing” as a female, or jury deliberations. They depend on “ethno-

graphic reportage,” the phrase that Garfinkel uses in Chapter 5 of this volume,
mentioning the studies of the documentary method in particular, and suggesting
that there “are grounds for dissatisfaction.” In c hapter 5 (written in about 1974),
he was perhaps aware that his earlier insights about interaction, including signs,
gestures, and their manner of delivery, remained out of reach through ethno-
graphic methods. By way of contrast, he cites additional studies, such as his own
investigation of queuing and those of the conversation analysts, proposing that
these different approaches have “particular lessons to teach on the phenomena”
regarding what he calls “the Missing What.”
Garfinkel’s concern with indexicals suggests the necessity of studying speech
practices, but there is a crucial difference between his investigations and Sacks’s
explorations of talk.1 Garfinkel (1967:Chapter 1), after referring to Husserl’s and
others’ raising the “problem” of indexical expressions, goes on to probe everyday
environments of professional and lay activity, and remark on solutions to index-
ical actions in such practices as “ad hocing,” deploying “et cetera,” exploiting
“specific vagueness,” “waiting” for a later expression to disambiguate a present
one according to a “serial order” of expressions, and so forth.
Sacks, in contrast with Garfinkel, pursued a strategy, as Schegloff (1992a:xlviii)
has noted, of beginning “with some observations,” and then finding “the problem
for which those observations could serve as (elements of) the solution.” For ex-
ample, a basic Sacksian investigation of indexical expressions, or what he calls
“indicator terms,” begins with noticing how members of a group therapy ses-
sion (audio-recorded data used in early CA studies) invoked “here” and “this”
and “this place” to display mutual understanding of the setting of their talk as
just such a therapeutic occasion (Sacks 1992a:519–21). But these indicator terms
represent the participants’ ways of invoking the setting and possibly different
features of it. Moreover, they do so in ways that do not require specification and
cannot be easily disputed.
Accordingly, Sacks (1992a:517) critiques philosophical and other treatments of
indexicals as problematic because they arise from an excessive preoccupation with
“the ‘truth’ of sentences including them.” Sacks (1992a:521) goes on to argue how
“that whole business was exploded by Wittgenstein,” in that an indicator term does
not have a final practical, much less a theoretical, solution to solving its reference
or truth value. Instead, it could be said that indexicals are a resource that have as
their precise business the invocation of the setting without saying which aspect of
the setting is being invoked. Consistent with Schegloff ’s (1992a:xlviii) remarks, the
crux is that indexical expressions, as a resource, do not need a solution. They are a so-
lution. As such, they are resources that participants use, not problems for them to
solve. His emancipation from the view that indexical expressions are a “problem”
liberated Sacks’s thinking about human interaction and allowed him to consider its
nuances without the theoretical baggage of logical empiricism. In this sense, Sacks
began his empirical researches from the point that Wittgenstein had reached after a
long struggle with a common adversary, the essentialist view of sign meanings that
was so deeply entrenched in philosophy and the social sciences.
In a later joint paper with Sacks, On Formal Structures of Practical Actions
(Garfinkel and Sacks 1970), Garfinkel once again raised indexical expressions as
problematic,2 commenting on the bulk of social scientific efforts to “remedy” in-
dexical expressions. He also noted that these attempts to substitute context-free
for context-bound expressions involved a process that his own investigations
demonstrated was doomed to futility. But these Sisyphean efforts need to be dis-
tinguished from how lay members orient to the inherent contextuality of lan-
guage and meaning. Accordingly, having noted how speech “contains more”
than its denotations, and may “signify anything” by way of indexical expressions,
Garfinkel remains preoccupied with the problematics of indexical expressions
for the social sciences, one that is less effective in raising empirical questions
about how participants adapt and use these inherent features of everyday lan-
guage use. Conversely, Sacks’s starting point is not with theoretically pre-identi-
fied problems, but with observations that directly illuminate naturally occurring
conduct in flight, revealing the indigenous uses to which indexical expressions
are put in everyday actions and activities.
In sum, Garfinkel’s treatment of the concision and flexibility of ordinary
speech arose from a critique of Parsonian theory’s failure to deal with funda-
mental aspects of social interchange, but his empirical research was inspired
by phenomenological writings that pointed toward a taken-for-granted do-
main of common-sense knowledge and forms of reasoning. The incongruity
demonstrations succeeded brilliantly in exposing the utterly foundational do-
main of indexical expressions and their reflexive relation to their circumstances
of use, making them available for analytic appreciation. These demonstrations
were less successful in showing how an empirical program might build a
systematic investigation of these phenomena. When Garfinkel refers to how
participants manage social settings by way of their “account-able” conduct, he
means that there are actual, real-time practices for both producing and rec-
ognizing the setting and its features. It has been Sacks and allied conversation
analysts, however, who have carried the investigation of such practices forward.
Harvey Sacks: Formative Influences and Interests
The line from Garfinkel to Sacks is best appreciated in conjunction with other lines
of inspiration and influence, and in light of Sacks’s own scholarly pursuits which
conditioned the kinds of resources to which he was exposed and what he made
of them. Harold Garfinkel figures centrally in this process, together with Erving
Goffman, a second and relatively underappreciated contributor to the conversation
analytic lineage. Sacks drew from these and other sources, but what he took from
them is hardly more significant than what he left behind, and he also embraced
methodological innovations from his collaborators Emanuel Schegloff and Gail
Jefferson. The creative synthesis that emerged from all of this was heavily shaped by
Sacks’s own abiding interest in developing a thoroughly emic but rigorous science of
social action.
Law School
Sacks’s relevant academic background begins, not in sociology, but at Yale Law
School, where he received his LLB in 1959. A central component of legal training
involves applying general legal principles to specific cases, whether the principles
are formally codified in statutes or inferred from precedent. This form of legal
training, which interrogates the fit between abstract codes of conduct and concrete
events, may have predisposed Sacks toward a receptivity to Garfinkel’s exploration
of the common-sense reasoning required to implement social norms and rules of
conduct in everyday life. This association, although somewhat speculative, is rein-
forced by Schegloff ’s (1992a:xiii) firsthand account of a story told by Sacks about
a problem in case law—how low can an airplane fly before it becomes “unreason-
able” and vulnerable to property-owner lawsuits?—exemplifying the largely tacit
but nonetheless controlling power of ordinary common sense in professional legal
reasoning. Puzzles of this sort appear to have led Sacks away from the practice of
law and toward an interest in its sociological underpinnings.
Of potential relevance also is the fact that the case method approach to legal
training relies heavily on formal Socratic dialogue between professors and students.
This pedagogical approach, which emphasizes active problem-solving and public
accountability within an interrogative framework, emerged at Harvard Law School
in the late 1800s under the influence of the then-prevalent pragmatist theory of
learning, and quickly spread to become the dominant approach to legal training
(Garvin 2003). As we discuss later in the chapter, formal dialogue would become
a source of inspiration for Sacks as he began to focus on talk as a phenomenon and
speaking practices as constraints on conduct (Schegloff 1992a:xv–xvi).
Garfinkel
Sacks’s relationship to Harold Garfinkel dates to his later law school years,
when he was reconsidering a career in the law but had not yet made the leap
to sociology. During this transitionary period, a Talcott Parsons seminar at

Harvard led to an encounter with Garfinkel (Schegloff 1992a:xii–xiii), the only
sociologist then focused on the import of common-sense reasoning in environ-
ments of everyday life that included courts of law.
Garfinkel’s deep influence can be found in the prominence of common-
sense reasoning in much of Sacks’s early work, which focused on explicating
“methods” or “devices” (the latter is Sacks’s preferred term) for sense-making
and understanding. For Sacks, however, this was paired with a parallel interest in
methods for producing ordinary social actions and coherent sequences of action.
As noted earlier, the action side of the equation was programmatically registered
by Garfinkel but remained empirically underdeveloped in his studies from the
1950s–1960s; for Sacks this would become an increasingly predominant focus of
research as time went on.
Garfinkelian interests also infuse Sacks’s recognition that the sequential organi-
zation of action provides a workable participant-based solution to the problems of
meaning and intersubjectivity posed by Garfinkel. Sacks’s key insight is that since
actions are frequently responsive to or at least occasioned by prior events, they
are a locus for public displays of understanding of what just happened—whether
“what just happened” was an utterance, a gesture, a silence, or whatever. This in-
sight was plainly inspired by Garfinkel’s preoccupation with the indexical features
of language and action, but it was an entirely novel approach that focused away
from how understandings are arrived at (through a quasi-phenomenological pro-
cess of sign-meaning expansion and particularization in context), and toward how
such understandings are made public in and through subsequent conduct. Sacks’s
discovery of sequential organization thus had ramifications for how the indexical
potential of language and social behavior gets constrained through successive un-
derstanding displays, providing a procedural basis for intersubjectivity that is con-
tinuous, emergent, and built into the exchange structure of interaction itself.
It should be apparent from this brief sketch that Sacks built upon the ethno-
methodological foundation that Garfinkel had set, but he did so in highly inno-
vative ways that entailed a rather decisive and consequential shift into the domain
of action. Correspondingly, Sacks only selectively engaged with Garfinkel’s pro-
gram. Indeed, many Garfinkelian preoccupations (e.g., the irremediable incom-
pleteness of norms and rules, the singularity of occasions) and methods (the use
of contrived experiments and demonstrations) would prove to be marginal or
irrelevant to Sacks’s work. Notwithstanding their prior scholarly relationship,
Sacks chose Berkeley rather than UCLA for his graduate training in sociology.
Sacks’s pursuit of generic “methods for doing social life” in the particular arena
of human interaction, using more naturalistic research methods, was informed
by the approach of his other significant mentor and primary advisor at Berkeley,
Erving Goffman.
Goffman
Just as Sacks drew selectively from Garfinkel, the same can be said of his rela-
tionship to Erving Goffman. The Goffman that would prove influential for
Sacks was not the analyst of total institutions and social stigma, ritual and cer-
emony, or even self-presentation, although this latter was closer to the mark; it
was rather the Goffman who pioneered the study of the interaction order as a
sociological specialization. This pithy term was coined by Goffman in his 1981
American Sociological Association (ASA) presidential address (published in
1983), substantially after Sacks’s own untimely death in 1975. The approach to
which it referred, however, was Goffman’s long-standing preoccupation from
his 1953 doctoral dissertation onward (Kendon 1990). Here we focus mainly
on Goffman’s programmatic statements and analyses (e.g., Goffman 1963, 1964,
1967), prior to and concurrent with Sacks’s early work.
As far back as his dissertation, Goffman proposed that the domain of in-
teraction between persons is a species of social organization comprising rules
governing various and sundry interactional occasions. Goffman worked to ab-
stract from otherwise diverse occasions “the orderliness that is common to all
of them, the orderliness that obtains by virtue of the fact that those present are
engaged in spoken communication” (Goffman’s 1953 dissertation, quoted in
Kendon 1990:39). This form of order underlies the more familiar institutional
and structural orders of society, but it is not merely a neutral medium in which
other structures operate and are reproduced (Goffman 1964); it is a partially au-
tonomous order with its own organizational integrity. Later, Goffman would de-
scribe this order as a social institution in its own right, and its norms as a system
of enabling conventions not unlike “the ground rules of a game, the provisions
of a traffic code, or the syntax of a language” (Goffman 1983:5). These abstract
ideas were fleshed out by Goffman’s observations of the specific norms and
conventions that distinguish unfocused from focused interaction, coordinate
entry into and exit from the latter, regulate attention and involvement, and other
elementary tasks intrinsic to the conduct of interaction per se.
Goffman maintained a thoroughly structural conception of the interaction
order, which he characterized with a transparent albeit tongue-in-cheek nod to
Durkheim as “a reality sui generis as He used to say” (Goffman 1964:134). He
later famously elaborated on this idea, portraying it as a level of social reality that
transcends the individual:
I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psy-
chology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons
mutually present to one another. . . . Not, then, men and their moments, but
rather moments and their men. (Goffman 1967:2)
Goffman’s influence on Sacks is evident in the substantive focus on the domain

of direct interaction between persons, and on the structural approach to this
domain. Sacks repeatedly argued that interactional practices, whether they be
practices of sense-making or of talking, can be examined as trans-situational
“devices” for performing certain tasks. While he insisted on documenting these
practices as they are manifest within the contextual details of specific cases, his
interest remained squarely focused on excavating what was generic and export-
able from such materials. This interest permeates even the papers based on single
cases (e.g., Sacks 1972b, 1974, 1975, 1978). Taken together, such devices and their
interactional sequelae comprise a “machinery” of interaction: As Sacks noted:
. . . it is not any particular conversation, as an object, that we are primarily in-

terested in. Our aim is to get into a position to transform . . . our sense of “what
happened,” from a matter of a particular interaction done by particular people,
to a matter of interactions as products of a machinery. (Sacks 1984:26)
There is a direct conceptual line from Goffman’s “moments and their men” to
Sacks’s conversational “machinery.”
At the methodological level, Goffman’s imprint is further apparent in the
naturalistic thrust of Sacks’s approach, which strongly emphasizes non-con-
trived data in conjunction with a specimen-collection approach to data gathering
(Maynard and Clayman 2018), a methodology common in geology, botany, and
zoology, as well as the then-emerging field of ethology, which had a direct in-
fluence both on Goffman and on the context analytic framework developed by
Fromm-Reichmann, Hockett, and Bateson, among others, at Palo Alto (Kendon
1990; Leeds-Hurwitz 1987; Scheflen 1966). Specimen-collecting involves the
compilation of numerous exhibits of a given phenomenon for systematic com-
parison and analysis in relation to the contexts in which they occur. The develop-
ment of collections, as a component of CA methodology, is a theme we take up
later in this chapter.
Notwithstanding these conceptual and methodological continuities, Sacks’s
engagement with Goffman was just as partial and selective as it was with
Garfinkel. There is no evident interest in asylums or other total institutions,
and only marginal interest in dramaturgy, self-presentation, or stigma manage-
ment. And while Sacks took up Goffman’s call for a sociology of the interaction
order, he was not particularly interested in those aspects that most preoccupied
Goffman, namely the intertwined phenomena of face, ritual, and ceremony. As
Schegloff (1988) has observed:
Goffman’s focus on patterns of talk and action was tied to ritual and face,
and resisted “secularization” to the syntax of action. . . . On this reading, the
greatest obstacle to Goffman’s achievement of a general enterprise addressed

to the syntactical relationship between acts was his own commitment to
“ritual,” and his unwillingness to detach such “syntactic” units from a func-
tionally specific commitment to ritual organization and the maintenance of
face. (1988:94–95)
Sacks’s (1984) contrasting orientation toward the prospect of “order at all points”
yielded a far broader interest in the dynamics of action and sequence, and would
eventuate in the investigation of generic systems of practice that solve the most
fundamental problems that interactants face: how to manage the orderly transfer
of speakership, resolve problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding, and
so on (Heritage 2008; Schegloff 2006).
Sacks’s debt to both Garfinkel and Goffman is overtly acknowledged in an early
paper (Sacks 1972a), and the interweaving of threads from both mentors imparts
a highly distinctive cast to his work. This is nowhere more evident than in the si-
multaneous pursuit of, and indeed tension between, analytic specificity and gen-
erality. The Garfinkelian emphasis on the indexical properties of expressions and
a continued openness to the “something more” that each instance-in-context can
provide, sits alongside the Goffmanian pursuit of the structural “conversational
machinery” at the heart of the interaction order. How to combine and reconcile
these very different analytic sensibilities was by no means obvious at the outset
and would take time to develop.
Scientific Ambitions and Talk as Data
If Goffman and Garfinkel guided Sacks toward the domain of the interaction
order and methods of reasoning operating within and upon it, the interest in
talk per se and recorded and transcribed talk in particular came from elsewhere.
For the affordances and rigors of such data, his mentors provided little if any
guidance. Goffman’s methods were predominantly ethnographic, although
supplemented with the data of etiquette manuals and mass media accounts.3
Garfinkel, for his part, conducted ethnographic interviews for the Agnes study
(1967:Chapter 5) but, as discussed previously, he favored experiments and
quasi-experimental demonstrations in much of his work. Furthermore, leading
theorists of the day in both sociology and linguistics were promoting ideas
whose analytical abstractness—e.g., Parsons (1937) on “the unit act” vs. concrete
actions in real time, and Chomsky (1957) on language as a formal system vs.
actual speech—ran against the grain of using concrete and ostensibly “messy”
everyday talk as data. Why and how, then, did recordings and transcriptions of
naturally occurring talk-in-interaction enter into Sacks’s research?
To address this puzzle, it bears emphasis that Sacks had an abiding interest in
developing a more rigorous science of social life. If his commitment was toward
an emic rather than a positivistic discipline, it was one characterized by greater
descriptive precision and the accountability of analytic judgments. In the schol-
arly community then concerned with the domain of everyday life, this ambition
was distinctive and was formed quite early in Sacks’s graduate career. It evidently
predates his first recorded lectures on conversation (in the fall of 1964), his dis-
sertation research on suicide calls, and even his fellowship year at the Center for
the Scientific Study of Suicide (1963–1964) from which the dissertation project
would emerge. In his very first publication, “Sociological Description,” which
appeared in the student-run Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Sacks (1963) expressed
dissatisfaction with prominent social science methods such as Durkheim’s sta-
tistical generalizations and Weber’s ideal types. The abstractness and impreci-
sion of such methods, he argued, were rooted in their elementary descriptive
practices, which relied on “common-sense categories as sociological resources
rather than as features of social life which sociology must treat as subject matter”
(Sacks 1963:16). This daunting problem was diagnosed in Garfinkelian terms,
but it was paired with a strikingly un-Garfinkelian expression of optimism about
the prospects for greater descriptive rigor:
Certainly no one has produced a demonstration that the world is undescribable.

Indeed, what would such a demonstration look like? (Sacks 1963:16)
Such optimism was part and parcel of Sacks’s overt commitment to scientific
advance:
I take it that at least some sociologists seek to make a science of the discipline;
this is a concern I share, and it is only from the perspective of such a concern
that the ensuing discussion seems appropriate. (Sacks 1963:2)
Although Sacks offered no solution to the problem of adequate sociological de-

scription at this early juncture, he was evidently on the lookout for a way forward.
Several convergent scholarly experiences from the early 1960s may have
nudged Sacks toward a solution. One was his encounter with the work of Iona
and Peter Opie on The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), a land-
mark monograph in folklore studies published just as Sacks was transitioning
from Yale law to Berkeley sociology. As Schegloff (1992a:xvi) has noted, this
work (among others) stimulated in Sacks an interest in children’s culture that
would eventuate in a number of course lectures and posthumous publications
(Sacks 1979, 1980). But this substantive impact had a methodological corol-
lary: the book also provided an early exemplar of how sociological interests may
be pursued and vividly grounded in transcribed data. The book is a treasure

trove of schoolyard rhymes, jokes and riddles, jeers and torments, and of various
and sundry speech acts: affirming, betting, bargaining, giving, taking, claiming
precedence, and so on. And while the database is lacking in sequential, prosodic,
and embodied detail, it nonetheless exemplifies a number of methodological
techniques that would become central to CA. Transcribed examples reveal con-
crete instances of speech acts and verbal formulae for their performance. The
presentation of arrays of such examples provides for the public accountability
of analytic claims (here regarding the geographic spread of such practices and
their endurance over time), and is suggestive of a specimen-collection approach
to data gathering and analysis. And the entire book vividly illustrates what a res-
olutely emic and data-driven approach to language practices—one that begins
with patterned observations and the indigenous preoccupations that they index,
rather than abstract theoretical problems—might look like.
A second source of inspiration for the data of talk was formal interrogative
dialogue, which Sacks encountered in different varieties and contexts. After di-
rectly experiencing the constraints of Socratic dialogue in law school (noted ear-
lier), and then in 1963 observing psychotherapeutic dialogue at the Center for
the Scientific Study of Suicide in Los Angeles, Sacks developed an interest in the
latter as “a form of discourse designed to control conduct” (Schegloff 1992a:xv).
At around the same time, his colleague Emanuel Schegloff was recording psy-
chiatric competency and criminal insanity examinations for analysis (Schegloff
1992a:xvii).
Against this backdrop, when Sacks came across audio recordings and steno-
graphic transcripts of telephone calls to the Suicide Prevention Center sometime
during the 1963–1964 academic year, he would have been primed to recognize
their potential as forms of data. Shortly thereafter, he would embark on his dis-
sertation project and, in the fall of 1964, he would deliver the first course of
“Lectures on Conversation,” based largely on analyses of those calls.
It’s remarkable how quickly Sacks realized the affordances of recorded talk for
advancing a science of social action, and how rapidly his analytic approach to
such materials developed. In his 1964 and very first recorded lecture (discussed
in the section on “Situated Actions and Responses” below), he proposed that
particular verbal formulae are methods for doing things, each with its own so-
cial import and sequential consequences. He further proposed that transcribed
renderings of such formulae are also, in effect, rigorous descriptions that capture
the design of singular actions in particular contexts, with ramifications for action
implementation elsewhere. In later lectures, Sacks would also comment on the
affordances of transcript excerpts for scientific accountability, allowing others to
“look at what I had studied, and make of it what they could, if they wanted to dis-
agree with me” (Sacks 1992a:622, see also Sacks 1984). But already in 1964, not
long after sketching the thorny problem of “Sociological Description” (1963),

Sacks evidently understood that by virtue of such materials he was well on his
way toward providing a solution, the kind of descriptive grounding essential for
sociology to advance.
Sacks’s Early Empirical Research
Sacks’s empirical research from the 1960s, conducted before conversation anal-
ysis had crystallized as a field of study, can be found in his dissertation project
and related publications (Sacks 1967, 1972b, 1972a), his UCLA and UC Irvine
lectures from that time period (Sacks 1992a, 1992b), and sole-authored articles
published later but originating in those early lectures (e.g., Sacks 1975, 1978).
An overarching interest in “methods,” “procedures,” or “devices” for doing things
permeates this work, each explicated through the detailed analysis of a single
case or comparative analysis of a small number of cases. Within this general ap-
proach, three thematic clusters may be discerned.
Descriptive Accounts and Social Reasoning Methods
In several of these pieces, Sacks begins with a particular everyday description or

account, and then explores the social reasoning that underlies its production and
provides for its intelligibility. This approach is central to his dissertation, which
interrogates the account given to suicide helpline counselors that “I have no one
to turn to” so as to reveal the social organization underlying the reporting of
personal problems (Sacks 1967). In a similar vein are papers on “The baby cried,
the mommy picked it up” (Sacks 1972b), “Everyone has to lie” (Sacks 1975), as
well as an early lecture on “I am nothing” (from the fall of 1964, in Sacks 1992a).
Note that in each case the starting point is some actual, naturally occurring re-
mark that is ostensibly telegraphic or “extreme,” suggesting that the speaker must
mean something more or at least different than what the literal meaning of their
words would indicate. The analysis then focuses on how such remarks represent
a methodical solution to some problem or set of problems that speakers actually
confront, and how an appreciation of that practical context provides for each
remark’s intelligibility and reasonableness.
The social reasoning methods that emerge from this work sometimes involve
common-sense knowledge of identity categories and the conduct normatively
associated with them, which would later be termed membership categoriza-
tion devices (MCDs) and category-bound activities. Other such methods in-
volve knowledge about speech acts and their sequential organization. The paper
“Everyone Has to Lie,” published in 1975 but originating in lectures from 1967,
illustrates this range of interests. The paper explicates common-sense know-
ledge regarding social identities and personal information transfer, in conjunc-
tion with knowledge of conversational structure and sequence—namely the
exchange of greetings and personal state queries (e.g., How are you?) at conver-
sational openings. While this paper resembles other accounts-and-social-rea-
soning papers in its overall narrative trajectory, the sequential elements shade
over into the next type of paper.
Of the three main lines of work that Sacks would develop, this line on accounts
and social reasoning is most heavily indebted to Garfinkel, and in particular his
preoccupation with indexical expressions. Even so, the stark contrast between
Garfinkel’s breaching-experiment approach and Sacks’s naturalistic, conversa-
tional data-driven, and more action-focused approach to the same phenomenon
is an early harbinger of developments to come.
Situated Actions and Responses
A second body of work concerns devices or practices for the performance of con-
versational actions. This work tends to exhibit greater attention to the situated
nature of such practices and the responses they receive, once again addressing
the indexical properties of expressions, but this time in relation to the sequencing
of action and thus anticipating the development of sequential organization as a
primary focus of CA research. Work in this vein can be found throughout Sacks’s
(1992a, 1992b) lectures and some of the sole-authored papers derived from them
(Sacks 1975), as well as later sole-authored papers on agreement and contiguity
(Sacks 1987), and joke-telling (Sacks 1974). Contrary to the widespread belief
that Sacks began focusing on accounts and social reasoning and only later devel-
oped an interest in action and sequencing, in reality both kinds of analytic efforts
are intermingled throughout the earliest lectures. This point is obscured by the
(often) delayed publications, which, as we noted earlier, have dates that bear little
relationship to the timing of the research on which they are based.
The most telling evidence for the simultaneous development of work on ac-
counts/social reasoning and action/sequence can be found in the first year
(1964–1965) of Sacks’s lectures on conversation. These lectures were contem-
poraneous with the dissertation research in progress and constitute the earliest
written record of his empirical research interests. His very first lecture at UCLA
is entitled “Rules of Conversational Sequence” and concerns telephone conversa-
tion openings, the organization of sequences devoted to greetings and identifica-
tion, self-identification as an indirect method of soliciting an interlocutor’s name
without explicitly asking for it, and “hearing trouble” as a method of avoiding
giving one’s name without explicitly refusing to do so. The next two lectures are
also focused on forms of action in sequence. Other lectures are concerned with
accounts, MCDs, and related forms of social reasoning (most notably Lecture
5: “Suicide as a device for discovering if anybody cares,” Lecture 6: “The MIR
membership categorization device,” and Lecture 9: “I am nothing”), but at least
half of that first year of lectures focus on matters arising from the production and
sequencing of action. For instance:
Lecture 1: Rules of conversational sequence

Lecture 2: On suicide threats getting laughed off
Lecture 3: The correction-invitation device
Lecture 7: On questions
Lecture 10: Accountable actions
Lecture 11: On exchanging glances
Lecture 12: Sequencing: Utterances, jokes, and questions.
Accordingly, long before he completed his dissertation, Sacks freely interwove

practices of social reasoning, action, and sequence into his first course of lectures
on conversation.
Interactional Activities and Their Sociocultural Import
A third thematic cluster, emerging in the second year of Sacks’s lectures (1965–
1966), addressed the broader sociocultural implications of specific activity
frameworks. For instance, in an analysis plainly inspired by the Opies’ studies
of childhood games, Sacks (1980) argued that a game called “Button, button,
who’s got the button” offered children the opportunity to learn and practice
methods of dissembling and concealment. In a similar vein, Sacks (1979) exam-
ined teenagers discussing cars to develop the idea that teenage language use was
a means of creating specialized concepts and terminology that could escape the
control of adults. In a paper on responses to “how are you?” questions, Sacks
(1975) addressed (among other things) social constraints in the regulation of in-
formation about personal problems. And a dirty joke told by, and to, teenagers
(Sacks 1974, 1978) was explored by reference to the way such jokes can be “tests”
of sexual knowledge and understanding, and can partition knowing from un-
knowing joke recipients.
The generalizability offered in these lectures, and the papers that were sub-
sequently published from them, traded off the functionality he attributed to
the interactional practices he described, underwritten by reference to the eth-
nographic and cultural contexts in which they were situated. Some of the early
lectures/papers might be characterized as “hybrid” in their combined attention

to both action analysis and sociocultural import. In any case, Garfinkel’s call for
inquiry into the common methodic foundations of the production and recogni-
tion of actions and settings, and a resolution to problems arising from the malle-
ability and concision of natural speech, was yet to be fully realized.
From Cases to Collections
The early 1960s, then, saw Sacks pursuing the development of an emic science
of what Eric Livingston would later call the “witnessable order” concerned with
“how members of society produce and sustain the observable orderlinesses of
their own activities” (Livingston 2008:124). He was also committed to the fun-
damental ethnomethodological theorem that was the centerpiece of Studies in
Ethnomethodology. As Garfinkel succinctly stated it, this was the proposal that
. . . the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organ-

ized everyday affairs are identical with members procedures for making those
settings “account-able.” (Garfinkel 1967:1)
Sacks elaborated on the point in an early lecture, imparting to it a more

“generativist” and action-focused coloring:
A culture is an apparatus for generating recognizable actions; if the same

procedures are used for generating as for detecting, that is perhaps as simple a
solution to the problem of recognizability as is formulatable. (Sacks 1992a:226,
emphasis in original)
Later, Sacks commented (Hill and Crittenden 1968:41) that “there can be a set of
rules which can reproduce the problems in the data with which you started,” and
subsequently he was still more explicit:
the idea is to take singular sequences of conversation and tear them apart in
such a way as to find rules, techniques, procedures, methods, maxims [that]
can be used to generate the orderly features we find in the conversations we ex-
amine. The idea being, then, to come back to the singular things we observe in a
singular sequence, with some rules that handle those singular features, and also
necessarily handle lots of other events as well. (Sacks 1992b:339)
It was this focus on generativity that would eventually displace Goffman’s in-
fluence on Sacks’s approach to analysis. In place of normative rules in defining
and honoring self and other, Sacks substituted a focus on social action as a
product of formally describable methodic practices that could also serve as
resources in the management of intersubjective understanding. Treating sin-
gular specimens of action as constituted through, and evidence of, generative
methods for action production and recognition opened the door to a new ap-
proach to the study of action, one that contrasted with approaches pursuing
normative rules as independent causal factors identified through frequencies
and measures of association. Generative methods of action could be seen to
be operating anywhere, constituting a foundation not just for the generation
of action but also for its intelligibility and learnability. This was a completely
novel and distinctive conception of what generalizability in social science
could become (Sacks 1984:21).
In the early days, though, the search for this kind of generative generaliza-
bility was far from easy. The “terrible and essential” problem, as Sacks put it in
a later note to Schegloff (March 1974), was isolating “structure in particulars.”
This problem arises from the fact that methods for the production of actions ap-
pear in the midst of complex streams of singular actions in particular contexts.
Disentangling what might be context-free and generative about a practice
meant discerning “essence” from “accident” with little, if any, disciplinary guid-
ance (ibid.)
The identification of reproducible specimens of such methods in action, how-
ever, turned out to be critical. In his first lecture described earlier, focused on con-
versational sequences early in telephone conversations to a Suicide Prevention
Center (SPC), Sacks observed that, after an initial exchange, the conversations
could have alternative trajectories:
(1) [Sacks 1992a:3]

SPC: This is Mr Smith may I help you
Clr: Yes, this is Mr Brown
(2) [Sacks 1992a:3]

SPC: This is Mr Smith may I help you
Clr: I can’t hear you.
SPC: This is Mr Smith.
Clr: Smith.
And he further noted:
If the staff member used “This is Mr Smith may I help you” as their opening
line, then overwhelmingly, any answer other than “Yes, this is Mr Brown” (for
example, “I can’t hear you,” “I don’t know,” “How do you spell your name?”)
meant that you would have serious trouble getting the caller’s name, if you got
the name at all.” (Sacks 1992a:4)
Among other things, Sacks observed that the self-identification of the first line
functions as an invitation for the caller to reciprocate, as happens in the first case
in the preceding, and that it does so in a way that is not overt and that does not
open the way to the provision of explanations in the way that “May I have your
name?” might. Moreover, in the second of the two cases, he observed, the caller
does not ignore the SPC staffer’s overture; rather, his assertion of not hearing the
name invites the staffer to repeat it. It thus fills the “slot” in which the caller might
have responded with his own name. At the same time, the caller’s response is not
hearable as a “withholding” of his name, but rather as addressed to a hearing
difficulty that preempts response and does so “reasonably.” Finally, after the re-
peat “This is Mr Smith,” the caller can use the following slot to acknowledge the
name rather than give his own. Here, then, several conversational practices are
deployed in a sequence in which a caller is invited to give his name “off the re-
cord” and avoids doing so in an equally “off record” fashion—the whole event
being intelligible in terms of a context-specific confluence of generic rules of
conversational sequencing.
At the core of Sacks’s argument is the claim that conversational objects like
“I can’t hear you”4 may cluster into a discernible practice, or set of practices,
that can have particular and singular consequences in different situations of
action. About this, Sacks comments that conversational objects such as “I can’t
hear you”
can be used for whole ranges of activities, where for different ones a variety of
the properties of those objects will get employed. And we begin to see alterna-
tive properties of those objects. That’s one way we can go about beginning to
collect the alternative methods that persons use in going about doing whatever
they have to do. (Sacks 1992a:11)
Even as they are positioned in unique circumstances of interaction, Sacks

comments that these phenomena may well be generalizable:
There was a very classical argument that it would not be that way; that sin-
gular events were singular events, given a historian’s sort of argument, that
they just happen and they get more or less accidentally thrown together. But
if we could find that there are analytically hard ways of describing these
things—where, that is, we’re talking about objects that can be found else-
where, that get placed, that have ways of being used; that are abstract objects
which get used on singular occasions and describe singular courses of
activity—then that’s something which is exceedingly non-trivial to know.

(Sacks 1992a:11)
Here, in Sacks’s very first lecture on conversation, is an outline of what would

become CA’s core methodology in which specimen collections of specific
actions would be identified and their implementation and sequelae in a variety
of social contexts would be explored.
Structure in Particulars: Preference Organization
What we have seen so far, however, was a promissory note, embodying in-
tense theoretical intuitions, yet issued with, at best, a hazy notion of how
results could be delivered. The fundamental and “terrible” problem was
that, if social action is methodic in both its production and recognition, as
Garfinkel had proposed, this methodicity nonetheless emerges as situated in
particular occasions that are singular and locally contexted. How are these
contexts to be described and their relevant scope delimited? As Schegloff
(1992a) observes:
Starting out with a commitment to lay bare the methodicity of ordinary activ-
ities, and with his talent for seeing in singular occurrences the structural elem-
ents of which they were formed and composed, a world of data which refreshed
itself every moment . . . provided a virtual infinity of opportunities for new
observations, and new orders of observation. (1992a:lviii)
How could a “virtual infinity” of single cases of action be sources of evidence

about general phenomena? How can actions and understandings that are utterly
particular be made using generalized methods? Moreover, to the extent that the
methods of interaction may be reflexively inflected or colored by their contexts of
occurrence, does it even make sense to say that the “same” methods are deployed
from occasion to occasion?
The later 1960s witnessed a number of shifts in Sacks’s analytic outlook.
One involved a decisive shift from the analyst’s understanding to that of the
participants as the primary point of analytic departure (Schegloff 1992a:xliii–
xliv). To provide evidence of the latter, the analyst is driven to ground analytic
claims about a given practice in its treatment by the participants, located espe-
cially in subsequent conduct. This treatment could include absent actions, and
required work on the contexts in which actions can be seen as relevantly absent.
In these developments, the notion of sequence and sequential organization
would assume an ever-increasing role: for whatever the kaleidoscopic variega-

tion of social contexts (that Garfinkel had first identified), and the multiplicity
of contextual elements that could in principle be relevant at any moment, it was
through sequence that participants could be shown to display their orientations
to the particular interactional grounds through which their actions would nec-
essarily be implemented.
The end of the 1960s saw Sacks almost without publications, but with a wide-
spread academic following that, as the Sacks Archive at UCLA shows, was
hungry for copies of his mimeographed lectures given at UCLA and later UC
Irvine. This collection of scholars clearly regarded him as a brilliant and orig-
inal researcher, and the circulation of his lectures at this time was Sacks’s “most
successful and prolific form of scientific communication” (Schegloff 1992a:xix).
This same period saw the emergence of an analytic methodology that would have
a decisive impact on the future course of CA, and of the development of CA as a
disciplined process of inquiry. This methodology involved the assembly of data
corpora, and the associated creation and analysis of significantly larger specimen
collections of interactional phenomena.
Starting in 1968, Sacks’s lectures began to exhibit a shift in stance “toward
systematicity and toward the relevance of substantial amounts of data, that
is, aggregates of conversations or of instances of particular phenomena in it”
(Schegloff 1992b:x–xi). This was associated with a shift in which, rather than
using some particular moment in conversation as a jumping off point, Sacks
began to use “an observation about a regularity in an aggregate [as] the point
of departure” (Schegloff 1992b:x–xi). In short, the shift was to “an order of or-
ganization, rather than a particular practice, of talking; a class of places in an
aggregate of data, rather than an excerpt; an organizationally characterized
problem or form of interactional work, rather than an individually designed out-
come; invariancies of features rather than context-specified practices” (Schegloff
1992b:x–xi). Although Schegloff did not mention it in this context, 1968 was also
the year in which “Sequencing in Conversational Openings” (Schegloff 1968) was
published. The paper was based on a large aggregate of data (500 instances) and
was likely influential in the development of Sacks’s thinking. Indeed, in a later
note to Schegloff (dated March 1974), Sacks remarked that Schegloff had been
successful in expanding analyses so as to deal with, as he put it, “masses of data.”
The fruits of research using “masses of data” would emerge in the early 1970s
in the turn-taking paper (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) which is among
the most highly cited papers ever published in the social sciences, a subse-
quently published paper on repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977), and a
sole-authored paper on preference organization in conversation (Sacks 1987),
to which we now turn.
“On the Preferences for Agreement and Contiguity in Sequences in

Conversation” was prepared for delivery at the 1973 conference of the Linguistic
Society of America. Sacks did not work further on the paper before he died in a
car accident in 1975, and it was eventually published from an edited audio-re-
cording some 14 years after its initial delivery. The significance of the paper lies
both in the clarity of its methodological stance, and its foundation for a number
of well-known subsequent studies by Sacks’s graduate students of the period
(e.g., Davidson 1984, 1990; Pomerantz 1975, 1978, 1984; Terasaki 2004) dealing
with preference organization as a widespread and robust phenomenon struc-
turing sequentially relevant alternative courses of action in interaction.
The paper begins from the observation that many sequences of action in con-
versation consist of paired actions (“adjacency pairs”), and that for many first-
pair parts there are alternative second-pair parts. Focusing on polar (or “Yes/
No”) questions, Sacks asks whether there are rules for the selection or “Yes” or
“No” answers and, additionally, for the placement of the “Yes” or “No” within
the answer. During the remainder of the paper, he advances the case that there
are rules of conversation that favor agreeing responses to polar questions (i.e.,
responses that affirm the proposition contained in the question), and also that
these responses should be given immediately and contiguously to the ques-
tion. Sacks is clear that these embody social norms that do not reflect personal
impulses or desires in any direct way, and he makes the argument by identifying a
range of practices and documenting their systematicity and recurrence through
the presentation of an interlocking array of specimens.
First, he observes (Sacks 1987:57) that agreeing responses to polar questions
are much more common than disagreeing ones. However, suggestive as this ob-
servation is, it does not directly show the work that participants do to achieve
this outcome. To explicate that work, Sacks observes that while agreeing answers
are performed promptly and contiguously, as in (3), disagreeing answers, as in
(4) (“I w—probably won’t be too early.”) tend to occur “late” within the turn and
hence non-contiguously:
(3) [Sacks 1987:57]

A: And it—apparently left her quite permanently damaged
(I suppose).
B: Apparently. Uh he is still hopeful.
(4) [Sacks 1987:58]

A: Yuh comin down early?
B: Well, I got a lot of things to do before gettin’
cleared up tomorrow. I don’t know. I w—probably
won’t be too early.
In addition, the respondent in (4) packs the unit prior to the disagreement with
items like “well” and “I don’t know” that can “get treated as ‘going in front of
disagreements,’ and that may have an import in signaling the future forthcom-
ingness of a disagreement” (Sacks 1987:59). Moreover, the disagreement itself
is “formed up so that the disagreement is as weak as possible” (Sacks 1987:58).5
Here, then, Sacks has identified a range of potentially recurrent practices used in
the formation of agreeing and disagreeing responses to question-based propos-
itions that accentuate agreement and downplay disagreement. These practices
operate at the level of sequence, concerning the relation between turns and, at
the level of the turn, concerned with the ordering of components within the turn.
Sacks next considers a set of related practices that avoid disagreement, but also
avoid accepting the proposition advanced by the question. For example, in (5),
the response could simply have been “No:”
(5) [Sacks 1987:62]

A: That where you live? Florida?
B: That’s where I was born.
Instead however, B provides a tangentially “agreeing” response, one that finds

something in the previous question to affirm. A related practice involves
the provision of an agreeing response, but adding subsequent components
to the response that restrict its scope with exceptions, or that otherwise
“walk it back.”
(6) [Sacks 1987:63]

A: ’N they haven’t heard a word huh?
B: Not a word, uh-uh. Not—Not a word. Not at all.
Except—Neville’s mother got a call . . .
(7) [Sacks 1987:62]

A: How about friends. Have you friends?
B: I have friends. So called friends. I had friends. Let me
put it that way.
Writing about this cluster of practices, Sacks articulates the import of non-rou-
tine or deviant cases within the analysis of specimen collections:
I am employing a strategy that we use a lot, and which therefore deserves a bit
of description. The strategy is this: if we can isolate, among the exceptions,
some classes—that does not mean some individual instances, but some
classes of instances (they have to have class-like characteristics)—which
turn out to be themselves oriented to the preference we are studying, then

we figure it (the preference) has a sort of second order validity. That is to
say, it not only works in a gross number of cases, which fit directly, but even
when it does not work, you can see it working. (Sacks 1987:59, italics in
original)
Thus far, we have focused on Sacks’s account of respondents’ practices for max-
imizing agreement, but questioners are also oriented to the same outcome. This
is shown in cases where, hearing a delay in response and anticipating disagree-
ment, questioners revise their questions in ways geared to promoting agreement.
The clearest cases are those in which the second question reverses the polarity of
the first.
(8) [Sacks 1987:64]

A: They have a good cook there?
((pause))
A: Nothing special?
B: No, everybody takes their turns.
(9) [Sacks 1987:64]

A: Ken you walk?
(0.4)
A: Ud be too hard for yuh?
B: Oh::: darling I don’t know. Uh it’s bleeding a little,
e’ jis took the bandage off yes’day . . .
Here it emerges that “agreement” between polar questions and answers is a

social preference that is observably worked toward by both questioners and
answerers. Moreover, the practices of both parties are coordinated with one an-
other: most obviously, delays by answerers reliably communicating upcoming
disagreement can be exploited by questioners to revise their questions before
the anticipated disagreement emerges. Although Sacks did not labor the point,
here is a clear form of social organization that maximizes the likelihood of affil-
iation and solidarity between speakers as a matter of institutionalized practice
rather than personal desire or predilection (cf. Clayman 2002; Heritage 1984;
Schegloff 2007).
Sacks’s analysis encompasses a remarkable range of practices that interlock
in the production of polar question-answer sequences. These include the asym-
metrical placement of agreeing and disagreeing responses relative to questions,
the mitigation of disagreements, and various practices that precede and displace
disagreements within the sequence. They also include practices by questioners
that display appreciation of these same asymmetries, register the foreshadowing

import of preliminaries to disagreement, and provide for the circumvention of
disagreement before it can be articulated. This interconnected system of practices
may not be entirely beyond the reach of single case analysis, but it would have to
be regarded as speculative and hypothetical without the support of the “masses
of data” derived from specimen collections.
The underlying phenomenon identified by Sacks in relation to polar questions
and answers has proved remarkably robust across a variety of sequences, in-
cluding assessments (Pomerantz 1978, 1984), requests, offers, and invitations
(Davidson 1984, 1990; Drew and Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Maynard 2016), across
interpersonal and mass communication (Clayman 1993; Heritage and Clayman
2010; Heritage and Greatbatch 1986), and across languages and cultures (Stivers
et al. 2009). Sacks’s analysis was extended to the turn-design level of varying
forms of agreement by Raymond (2003), and this in turn was leveraged into
treatments of more or less agentive responses to polar questions (Heritage
and Raymond 2005, 2012) which are also holding up across languages and
most cultures (Enfield et al. 2019). The “collections” methodology and its use
to identify classes of practices that collocate around systemic dilemmas for so-
cial interaction (Heritage 2008; Schegloff 2006) have been extensively deployed
ever since.
The formation of specimen collections has transformed CA, not only by pro-
viding a key method for grounding analytic claims, but also by ascertaining
their range and scope. In addition to clear cases, the creation of collections nor-
mally involves cases in which the practice is partially or imperfectly realized, to-
gether with others in which the practice might be expected to occur but does
not (Schegloff 1997). The formation and curation of collections of interactional
practices allow the researcher to establish the inner and outer boundaries of a
practice, and to examine its import across a range of contexts (Schegloff 1997).6
In a domain where the reflexive intersection of practices and contexts is consti-
tutive of action, collections allow researchers to appreciate both the breadth and
the specificity of practices and settings which can be shown to be the objects of
participants’ orientations in both the production of actions and their recognition.
Analyzing collections is, of course, hardly a foolproof method. It requires
judgments of similarity across cases where almost every element of comparison
involves the consideration of “family resemblances” that do not substantially
abstract from, and maximally accommodate to, the particularities of each case.
These judgments are by no means infallible, and are continually open for fur-
ther revision and refinement (Kendon 1990:47). But collections allow analysis
to proceed, developing findings subject to the checks that explicit reference to
evidence makes possible. This is how empirical investigations that both attend to
and reach beyond the single case can advance.
Conclusion
We have argued that conversation analysis emerged as a creative synthesis of

certain key ideas drawn from Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of the
1950s and early 1960s, together with ideas from Erving Goffman’s natural-
istic observations of the interaction order, and other sources. While Garfinkel
exhibited a fleeting interest in the study of interaction early in graduate school, he
abandoned this in favor of phenomenologically inspired work on common-sense
reasoning accessed through experiments and demonstrations. It was Harvey
Sacks who developed the study of common sense in the domain of naturally
occurring and temporally developing human interaction, marrying this with a
Goffmanian interest in the interaction order as a structural reality sui generis, and
with his own primary interest in developing a defensible science of social action as
it operates within and upon this order.
Much of Sacks’s approach can be discerned in his earliest recorded lectures,
but he would later incorporate additional inputs from Emanuel Schegloff and
Gail Jefferson in a process that continued to develop and progress over a consid-
erable period of time. This extended effort was, in retrospect, plainly necessary to
fashion an approach capable of fusing together disparate and seemingly incom-
patible elements: concerns with both emic naturalism and descriptive rigor, with
normative structures and the generative methods of their intelligible production
and reproduction, with context-specificity and generality, and with analyses of
both cases and collections in ways that are maximally public and accountable to
a scholarly community. The improbable fusion of these elements released a burst
of energy that continues to stimulate researchers across a wide range of discip-
lines that interface with human interaction.
Perhaps nowhere is the complex lineage of CA more evident than in Schegloff
and Sacks’s (1973) foundational study of how telephone conversations are
brought to a close. This paper, among the earliest CA papers to be published
and the first published collaboration between Sacks and Schegloff, contains
findings—involving a set of pre-closing and closing sequences—that are spe-
cified in formal terms and linked to organized systems of practice at varying
levels (turn-taking organization, sequence organization, overall structural orga-
nization). The findings are also offered as highly generalizable and functional
solutions to recurrent problems that inhabit virtually any effort to close down an
interactional encounter. This is Goffman’s interaction order incarnate.
At the same time, particular closing practices are transcribed and reproduced
with great specificity and detail and are examined with attention to their context-
specific meanings and import. Comparative analysis of routine and atypical
or deviant cases demonstrates how generic sequential resources can be mobi-
lized in singular ways that yield varying outcomes—including conversational
continuation rather than closure. And the entire analysis is grounded in the
displayed understandings of the participants, understandings that inform the
turn-by-turn production of each closing episode and are the central means by
which the participants show each other “where they are” in the closing pro-
cess (e.g., “winding down,” “ready to close but still in conversation,” etc.). These
Garfinkelian themes are underscored in a well-known and frequently cited in-
troductory passage:
We have proceeded under the assumption (an assumption borne out by our
research) that insofar as the materials we worked with exhibited orderliness,
they did so not only for us, indeed not in the first place for us, but for the
co-participants who had produced them. If the materials (records of natural
conversations) were orderly, they were so because they bad been methodi-
cally produced by members of the society for one another, and it was a feature
of the conversations that we treated as data that they were produced so as to
allow the display by the co-participants to each other of their orderliness, and
to allow the participants to display to each other their analysis, appreciation,
and use of that orderliness. Accordingly, our analysis has sought to explicate
the ways in which the materials are produced by members in orderly ways
that exhibit their orderliness, have their orderliness appreciated and used,
and have that appreciation displayed and treated as the basis for subsequent
action. (Schegloff and Sacks 1973:290)
It has become commonplace for authors to comment on the contemporary

intellectual gulf between CA and ethnomethodology. Trends in both areas—the
emergence of a post-analytic ethnomethodological stance (Lynch 1993), and
the use of larger data sets and quantitative methods in some CA studies—have
widened this gulf, making the common ground of their origins more difficult
to discern. We have sought to reconstruct some of the scholarly ferment out of
which both enterprises arose, and to isolate the specific ethnomethodological
elements that were taken up and incorporated into the conversation analytic fu-
sion, yielding an allied but nonetheless distinct approach to the foundations of
social life.
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PART III
GROW T H P OI NT S
11
The Situated and Methodic Production
of Accountable Action
The Challenges of Multimodality
Lorenza Mondada
Introduction
This chapter aims at contributing a reflection about the legacy of Harold

Garfinkel and the relations between ethnomethodology and conversation
analysis (CA), by focusing on a common concern for both programs: the
study of action as methodic (the term is used here in line with the sense of
ethnomethodology), i.e., ordered, accountable, recognizable, and reproducible.
Both approaches seek to describe the members’ (the term favored in ethnometh-
odology) or co-participants’ (the term favored in CA) production, recognition,
and reproduction of actions, understood as locally situated social achievements.
Within this framework, the chapter discusses two key dimensions of method-
ically produced actions—their situatedness and orderliness—and attempts to
show the importance of considering both of them together.
This discussion is developed in relation to a more recent trend in ethno-
methodology and CA, based on the use of video materials documenting nat-
urally occurring social interactions, permitting the fine-grained scrutiny of
the multimodal details of action. Multimodal analysis generates new insights
into both the situated and the ordered dimensions of the organization of so-
cial action.
Hence, in this chapter I discuss how the analysis of embodiment and
language in interaction might contribute to a better appreciation of the
situatedness and the orderliness of social action. Using empirical analysis, a
detailed description of a piece of data is considered in its specificity and in-
extricable situatedness, before discussing the possibility of finding other
instances of the phenomenon and thus the possibility of building a collec-
tion that would show the orderliness, methodicity, and reproducibility of the
features identified in the first instance.
Convergences and Specificities of Ethnomethodology and

Ethnomethodology and CA constitute two distinct intellectual programs that

not only have common historical origins, for example in the collaboration be-
tween Garfinkel and Sacks, but also common foundational interests. Without
ignoring differences and divergences that have emerged in the last decades be-
tween them, my interest is in their common concern for the situated as well as
systematic features of the organization of social action. Although one rather than
the other of these dimensions might have been favored by scholars working in
ethnomethodology or CA, both aspects are recurrently highlighted by both.
One of the central contributions of ethnomethodology is the study of the ac-
countability of action. For instance, Garfinkel’s (1967:1) “central recommen-
dation is that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of
organized everyday affairs are identical with member’s procedures for making those
settings ‘account-able.’ ” Stated differently,
ethnomethodology’s fundamental phenomenon and its standing technical

preoccupation in its studies is to find, collect, specify, and make instructably
observable the local endogenous production and natural accountability of im-
mortal familiar society’s most ordinary organizational things in the world, and
to provide for them both and simultaneously, as objects, and procedurally, as
alternate methods. (Garfinkel 2002:124)
This echoes Sacks’s (1992:226) point that “a culture is an apparatus for gener-
ating recognizable actions; if the same procedures are used for generating as for
detecting, that is perhaps as simple a solution to the problem of recognizability
as is formulatable.”
The production of accountable action is both locally situated and ordered.
In this respect, ethnomethodology and CA have often been contrasted for their
complementary focus: the former on the indexical, the latter on the systematic
features of action. Often ethnomethodology has been reduced, even caricatured,
to a perspective uniquely focused on the “hic et nunc” of social action; CA has
been depicted as primarily interested in the “machinery,” or the “apparatus,”
accounting for the reproducibility of social life. Consequently, the former has
been criticized for being too descriptive and not generalizable, and the latter for
a reductionist style of formal analysis. However, CA has been deeply engaged in
showing the context-shaping as well as context-shaped organization of action,
and ethnomethodology has continuously stressed the orderliness of social life as
the product of the methodical action of its members (Heritage 1984b). Against
the antagonistic versions that tend to oppose the two disciplines, rather than see
METHODIC PRODUCTION OF ACCOUNTABLE ACTION 291
their common history and concerns, in this chapter I attempt to develop a view of
situated and methodical action that takes into consideration both contributions.
Garfinkel’s legacy is important in this respect. On the one hand, he helps us
to consider the indexicality of multimodal resources (including language) as
being both an irremediable and a necessary feature of social action (Garfinkel
and Sacks 1970). Communicative resources—even the more conventionalized
ones, like grammar—are characterized by indefiniteness and underdetermina-
tion, which are contextually “filled-in” in actual usages. This points at the im-
portance of considering the haecceity of these resources: “The term ‘haecceity’
refers to the character of being here and now, the ‘just-thisness’ of any activity.
It is related to the hic of ‘hic et nunc’ ” (Garfinkel and Liberman 2007:4). The
study of haecceities is important for the disclosure of the local contingencies of
action (Lynch 1991:98). These aspects are even more crucial for multimodal ana-
lyses than for analyses only dealing with talk: the relevance of embodied details
depends largely on the features the participants locally exploit within the ecology
of the situated activity they are engaged in (Mondada 2014c), as we will see in the
following extracts.
On the other hand, the issue is to consider the orderliness of practices and
methodic mobilization of multimodal resources. Here too, Garfinkel’s inspi-
ration is important: “The technical, distinctive jobs of ethnomethodology, the
craft of ethnomethodology, consists of in vivo tasks of discovering phenomena
of order* as instructable achievements in and as of their coherent details”
(Garfinkel 2002:170).1 This relates to the production of the accountability of ac-
tion: “Phenomena of order are identical with procedures for endogeneous pro-
duction and accountability” (Garfinkel 2002:72). This means that recognizably
shared methods/methodic practices create the patterned orderliness of social
life; this order is interactively achieved in an occasioned, situated way by and for
the participants; consequently, this order is accountable, intelligible, mutually
recognizable for and b y them.
Video Data and the Analysis of Multimodality
This chapter discusses this articulation between indexicality and orderliness on

the basis of empirical challenges represented by video materials. Video data and
multimodal analysis are particularly confronted with this articulation: they invite
attention to the situated details of embodied action and at the same time entice a
search for the orderly methodical character of their organization. Multimodality
is a field that offers the opportunity to re-discuss these issues.
A multimodal approach within ethnomethodology and CA originates from
the observation that human action is fundamentally embodied and not reducible
to talk alone (Goodwin 1981, 2000; Heath 1986; Streeck, Goodwin, and LeBaron
2011). Participants produce and interpret social action by recruiting a range of
resources for building its intelligibility. Even if language is a key resource for
some types of activities, it is not a priori the most fundamental one (there is no
principled priority of language over other resources, and their eventual prioriti-
zation depends on the type of situated activity). Rather, action is methodically
organized through multimodal resources (i.e., language, gesture, gaze, head
orientations, body postures, movements, etc.) that are locally assembled in a sit-
uated and occasioned way (Mondada 2014c).
The issues of multimodality in conversation analysis have raised several
questions. They have produced different forms of skepticism, on the one hand
against the possibility of any systematic form of multimodal analysis, on the
other hand against the possibility of using CA notions for multimodal anal-
ysis, considering them as bound and restricted to talk-in-interaction. Moreover,
the analysis of multimodality has reproduced in new ways the old tension be-
tween in-depth analyses of single instances and analysis of collections of cases
(Schegloff 1988).
Multimodal analyses have also been conducted in rather different ways: mul-
timodal resources have been considered in more selective ways—e.g., by iso-
lating a particular resource or fragment of the body and showing its systematic
contribution to (talk-in-)interaction—see, for example, Schegloff (1984) on
gestures produced by speakers; Goodwin (1981) on gaze prompting restarts at
the beginning of the turn; Mondada (2007) on pointing as displaying imminent
speaker’s self-selection; Stivers (2008) on nods as expressing affiliation in sto-
rytelling; Peräkyla and Ruusuvuori (2006) on facial expressions as manifesting
alignment and affiliation in assessment sequences; Rossano (2012) on gaze at se-
quence boundaries. Other multimodal analyses are more holistic—e.g., by con-
sidering the embodied character of language and by considering the entire body
in action as well as bodies in interaction (see, for example, Broth and Mondada
2013 on mobile body movements; Goodwin 2000 on gaze, body positions,
space, and material objects; Heath 1989 considering together gaze, body pos-
ture, and body manipulations). In this latter perspective, talk and embodied
details feature in the organization of social interaction as constituting complex
multimodal Gestalts (Mondada 2014c; Mondada 2015), which are both specif-
ically adjusted to the context and systematically organized. In this context, my
aim in the present chapter is to discuss the very fact that when the entire body
is taken into consideration in its complexity, multimodal resources appear as
being strongly related to the specificity, situatedness, and uniqueness of a par-
ticular action in a particular ecology of action, raising the question of their or-
derliness, systematicity, and reproducibility.
From the perspective of a praxeological analysis taking into account the mul-
timodal resources mobilized by members for the production and recognition of
social action, we are invited to study how participants assemble sets of resources
as they are mobilized to achieve the accountability of their actions. These resources
are constantly selected, made relevant, made meaningful, and redefined as a
feature of the methodic accomplishments of the participants. They are index-
ical, situated, occasioned, adjusted to the contingencies and specificities of the
interaction; they are endogenously organized and recognized (as part of the
participants’ work). They combine both linguistic and embodied features, in a
way that orients to the constraints, but also the affordances and potentialities of
the local ecology.
Single Case Analysis and Analysis of Collections
Methodologically, considering the complexity of multimodal Gestalts raises the

issue of the analysis of collections. This kind of analysis has emerged within CA
in a gradual way (see Chapter 10, this volume), beginning with Sacks’s early idea
of an “apparatus” (see Sacks declaring that “there can be a set of rules which can
reproduce the problems in the data with which you started,” “a set of rules which
give me back my data” in Hill and Crittenden 1968:41–42). These “rules” do not
merely emanate from the analyst’s perspective, but are what members rely on in
order to produce the methodical character of their actions.
For Sacks (1984:27), the identification of a phenomenon emerges out of
“unmotivated inquiry” (Schegloff 1996b:172), without either pre-theoretical
assumptions or common-sense intuitions about typical actions. This approach
permits discovery of an action that cannot be imagined by introspection, that
was not previously studied, and that often has no layman name (like “confirming
an allusion”; Schegloff 1996a). As highlighted by Schegloff (1996b),
the aim is to find it and provide an account of it empirically and precisely, not
imaginatively or typically or hypothetically or conjecturally or experimen-
tally, and to use actual, situated occurrences of it in naturally occurring social
settings to control its description. (1996b:167)
Unmotivated inquiry is the departure point of the analysis, which then can be
elaborated in different ways:
The trajectory of such analyses may begin with a noticing of the action being
done and be pursued by specifying what about the talk or other conduct—in
its context—serves as the practice for accomplishing that action. Or it may

begin [ . . . ] with the noticing of some feature of talk and be pursued by asking
what—if anything—such a practice of talking has as its outcome. (Schegloff
1996b:172).
This description comprises: (a) what action is being accomplished, (b) how the
participants orient to it as such, and understand what it is doing, and (c) what, in
the production of talk/action, provides for the recognizability of that action for
the participants (Schegloff 1996a:172–73).
The result is a “discovery” of something that was not imagined, not
presupposed. So,
one cannot simply go through the stream of conduct seeking to identify which
previously known action, phenomenon, practice, and so on, a given “bit” exem-
plifies. [ . . . ] One needs to ask about each new object of examination what it
could be possibly doing, and ask, as well, what could constitute an object of ex-
amination to which this question could be put, that had not been so considered
before. (Schegloff 1996a:211)
Within the history of CA, collections have then been constituted by scholars in
different ways: some start with an action and describe the way it is implemented
in a particular sequential environment and with specific resources; others start
from a resource—typically a linguistic form—and study how it can be exploited
in particular actions and sequences.
Within the perspective of a multimodal analysis, collections raise the issue of
how to preserve the complexity and ecological specificity of the phenomenon
without losing its orderly character. Given the potential infinity of the multi-
modal features involved, the issue is also how to establish which multimodal
resources are made relevant by the co-participants: if the analysis and the col-
lection aims not to be just an etic model emanating from a scientific tradition,
but also an emic device that is oriented to endogenously by the co-participants,
the issue is indeed to identify the “apparatus” that constitutes the methodicity of
their practices.
Accordingly, I discuss the idea of collection by taking into consideration both
the situated specificity and the ordered systematicity of embodied actions. The
aim is also to show that collections are not just a methodological issue, and that
they cannot be reduced to a mere formal exercise based on equivalent classes of
patterns. Rather, the challenges of building collections address the fundamental
methodicity of human action: given that accountable action is methodically pro-
duced by assembling a multitude of details in an ordered way, this gives a clear
indication about the way in which to build collections of instances, paying atten-
tion both to the methods and to the details disclosed by members’ practices.
Data and the Phenomenon
The empirical demonstration in this chapter is based on a video recording of

a guided visit of a building by a famous architect. The cultural manager of the
building (Jean) leads a small group of visitors, including a person who has
worked for years on the site (Sophie), an architect (Yan), and his wife and asso-
ciate (Elise). The couple discovers the building for the first time, but knows and
appreciates other buildings by the same architect.
This activity provides for a perspicuous setting (Garfinkel and Wieder
1992) for the study of practices of seeing, looking at things together, and
instructed vision. Perception is often treated as a cognitive and intentional pro-
cess, even within accounts considering its intersubjective character (e.g., Eilan
et al. 2005). Ethnomethodology and CA have shown that it is rather established
and treated by the participants as a social and embodied issue (see, for example,
Goodwin 1994, 1995, 2000; Laurier and Brown 2004; Lynch 2013; Mondada
2003; Mondada 2014a; Nishizaka 2000, 2014; Sharrock and Coulter 1998). The
analyses provided in this chapter further contribute to these studies, by focusing
on the multimodal organization of noticings of visible details in the environment.
The event was filmed by several cameras: a camera on the group, a camera
glass worn by Yan, as well as an extra camera documenting how the activity has
been filmed (not used here, but see Mondada 2014b for a study of this kind of
view). The combination of a classical view on the group, which preserves the
features of the embodied participation framework and of the interactional space,
and a more subjective view, given by the camera glasses, is particularly valuable
in documenting activities such as noticing a detail, pointing at an object in the
environment, describing the surrounding space, etc., which are constitutive of
the guided visit. In turn, their analysis addresses more general issues of joint at-
tention and instructed vision as social interactional phenomena.
Within an ethnomethodology and CA perspective, video materials document
situated action in a way that attempts to preserve the relevant multimodal details
for analysis (Mondada 2006). Video recordings do not reproduce the perspective
of the participants: the main view allows the researcher to identify and observe
the issue of relevancies these participants build, within a third-person perspec-
tive. The camera glasses, although building a view that looks more like a first-
person perspective, provide hints about the orientation of the head and hence of
the direction gazed at, although they do not reproduce the gaze of the participant.
The fragments were analyzed on the basis of the video recording and presented
through their multimodal transcription. I have used the aligning software ELAN
for this, which allows the transcriber to annotate temporal segments of action at
different levels (or tiers).2
Each analyzed fragment is presented first on the basis of a textual transcript
representing verbal turns through talk, then on the basis of an ELAN transcript
representing the multimodal organization of the action. There is no need today to
remind readers that a transcript dealing only with talk is not sufficient to account
for situated co-present action; nonetheless, the characteristics of the turn might,
given the complexity of the transcripts that follow, be useful to be apprehended
first. The ELAN transcripts are a way to represent the multiple unfolding tem-
poralities of talk, gaze, gesture, and body movements in relation to a general
timeline. They are also a tool allowing the annotation of multiple streams of con-
duct within the same temporal environment—thanks to the possibility of freely
multiplying lines of annotations. Although transcription is a practice and a tool
that contributes in important ways to the establishment of regularities of talk and
embodied action, this chapter will not discuss the features of transcriptions per
se, but rather focus on features of the actions and interactions.
The analysis deals with two fragments from this visit. The detailed analysis of
the first is followed by the study of a second, which presents some similarities
with the former and allows us to sketch the methodical production of a specific
type of noticing, paying attention to both its systematicity and its indexicality.
A First Instance: Seeing a Detail, Noticing It, and

Showing It to the Co-Participants
In the first piece of data, as the group is walking in silence, Yan initiates a new
action: he produces a noticing concerning a detail of the architecture: a large
glass roof above them.
Producing a Noticing: “C’que moi j’adore c’est . . .”
We first look at the verbal transcript, before engaging in a detailed analysis of the
fragment.
Extract 1.0—verbal transcript (Cep1/56.27-LunCam52.12)
1 (22.4)
2 YAN: c’est vraiment c’que: j—moi j’adore, (.) c’est
it’s really what I—me I adore, (.) it’s

3 (0.6) ces plans là où on est: dans une cour:be,
(0.6) these plans there where we are in a curve,
4 avec eh
with eh
5 (0.3)
6 JEA: ouais (ouais)
yeah (yeah)
7 YAN: les deux aut’ courbes qui repartent,
the two other curves that go away,
8 celle-ci qui vient, les fenêtres,
this one that comes in, the windows,
9 SOP? hm
10 YAN: c’est des x—c’est des détails que j’adore hein.
it’s some x—it’s details that I love uh.
11 (0.6)
12 JEA: ouais
yeah
As the group moves on in silence (1), Yan produces a description of something

he notices above him. The noticing is organized in an incremental way. It does
not begin with the mention of the object being noticed, but is prefaced by “it’s
really what I—me I adore, (.) is” (lines 2–3). This construction constitutes a first
part that refers to an unspecified object (with a prospective indexical “c’ ”/“it”),
and projects a second part, in which the object will be named and described (“ces
plans là”/“these plans there”; line 3).
The verbal resource used has been called in syntax a pseudo-cleft construc-
tion, described as introducing first a referent with a cataphoric pronoun (“c’ ”/
“it”), followed by its specification and focalization (see Lambrecht 1994; Prince
1978; Roubaud 2000). In interactional linguistics, this construction has been
described as a strongly projective device (Günthner and Hopper 2010; Pekarek
Doehler and Müller 2008), opening a frame that is progressively specified as the
second part of the construction progresses—in service of the incremental trajec-
tory of the turn.
This first part of the description is responded to in a minimal way by Jean (line
6), with response tokens that are merely aligning with Yan, but that neither top-
icalize (Button and Casey 1985) his noticing nor request him to say more. Quite
the opposite, the affirmative token “ouais”/“yeah” and even more its repetition
display a recognition of the object rather than its discovery (Stivers 2004).
Nonetheless, Yan engages further in the elaboration of “these plans there”
(line 3), which takes the form of a list of features (lines 4, 7, 8). This list is
responded to with a minimally audible token by Sophie (line 9). At this point,
Yan closes the noticing: he organizes the end of his action by recycling (Schegloff
2011) the material he used at the beginning, the initial “(que) j’adore.”
This recycling closes the Gestalt that was opened by the pseudo-cleft: Yan’s
noticing can be described as mobilizing grammatical and syntactical features
that are both prospectively projecting the specification of the object noticed and
retrospectively referring to it.
We might wonder how and why the participant formats his turn in this way
and why he chooses these grammatical resources rather than other possible
forms, and how they are intertwined with other resources that format his action.
The responses by Jean and Sophie might constitute a warrant for Yan to both
expand his turn, offering new occasions to respond to it, and close it, orienting
to their minimal alignment. But at this point the verbal transcript is clearly not
enough to understand how the noticing is interactionally built. We turn to the
video and its multimodal transcription in order to provide an account of noticing
as a situated and embodied action.
From Individual Contemplation to Collective Vision:

Monitoring Co-Participants before Initiating the Sequence
If we look at the moments preceding the beginning of Yan’s turn, while the group
walks in silence, we can observe the emergent and dynamic ecology in which his
noticing takes place.
Figure 11.1 is the ELAN transcript of the 22.4 second silence preceding Yan’s
noticing (see Extract 1.0 on p. 296).
Fig. 11.1a/b Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3
Figure 11.1 ELAN Transcript: Extract 1.1-line 1

Figure 11.1a
Figure 11.1b
The group is walking down from the first to the ground floor, along a ramp
that has the form of a hairpin bend (Figure 11.1a).
The screen shot is taken 3.2 seconds before Yan begins to talk. We notice that
the “group” is walking in a dispersed way: Jean and Sophie walk together, and ex-
change smiles; Elise follows a bit behind; Yan is not yet visible on the camera view,
he is walking behind them, still above on the ramp and before the hairpin bend.
So, various participation frameworks characterize this moment of the visit, in
which the group is fragmented in smaller vehicular units, all progressing in the
walk forward but not within a unit that could be called a “with” (Goffman 1971).
At this point, Yan is looking at the glass roof above his head (Figure 11.1b). He
has stopped walking a bit before (2.6 seconds before) and the camera glass shows
that he is visually orienting toward the ceiling.
One second later, the participants continue to move forward and turn at the
hairpin bend (Figure 11.2).
Jean passes the hairpin bend: at this point, he is able to spot Yan’s position,
delayed in his walking, separated from the group, stopping and looking up. Jean
stops and looks up toward the ceiling, too (Figure 11.3). Thus, Yan’s noticing
is seen by Jean. The particular ecology of the pathway makes spotting and fol-
lowing the other’s gaze possible, without any other form of interaction between
Figure 11.2
Figure 11.3
the two participants. Meanwhile, Sophie and Elise continue to walk forward
(Figures 11.2, 11.3).
A Recipient-Designed Turn-Beginning
At this point, as shown in the next extract (and the ELAN transcript,
Figure 11.4), still without saying anything, Yan turns his head toward the
group, below on the ramp (Figure 11.5.a/b).
Extract 1.2—line 2
2 YAN: c’est vraiment c’que: j—moi j’adore, (.) c’est
it’s really what I—me I adore, (.) it’s
Gazing down, Yan can see that all the participants but Jean are walking
along the ramp, that Jean is looking at him, but that this is not the case for
Elise and probably not for Sophie (Figures 11.5a and 11.5b). The participants
are moving forward in disparate order and they are not gazing in the same
direction.
The practical problem encountered by Yan is how to initiate a noticing
within a context characterized by a dispersed interactional space, by different
Figure 11.4 ELAN Transcript Extract 1.2, line 2
Figure 11.5a Figure 11.5b
foci of attention and a mobile formation dynamically moving ahead. The very
fact that Yan, after having spotted the transparent roof, shifts his gaze to the co-
participants before beginning to speak, displays that he organizes his turn-be-
ginning and initiation of a new action and sequence by orienting first toward his
recipients. In this ecology, Yan’s practical task is to reconfigure the interactional
space and consequently rearrange the co-participants’ bodies (Mondada 2009),
in a way that is adequate for producing a noticing to be shared with them. He
achieves it by choosing a particular turn-beginning, a strongly projective gram-
matical construction.
Figure 11.6
The beginning of Yan’s turn is formatted in such a way as to mobilize the atten-
tion of his recipients. Yan mobilizes a series of linguistic resources as an attention
getting device: (a) by using a bipartite (pseudo-cleft) construction projecting
more to come (and even by combining it with a first cleft construction “c’est
vraiment” /“it’s really” also projecting more to come); (b) by referring to “it,”
projecting “it,” but without yet specifying “it”; (c) by assessing it with a strong
subjective expression, (“j—moi j’adore”), made even made stronger by the self-
repair (“j-“self-repaired into ‘moi j’ ”), Yan exploits lexis and syntax in such a way
that he mobilizes the attention of his recipients (Goodwin 1981). As a matter of
fact, Jean is already looking at him, Sophie turns her head toward him as soon as
he initiates his turn, Elise does so later on (the exact moment is not clearly visible
on the video view) (Figure 11.6). So, the initial construction is designed in such a
way to accommodate various responses that are produced at different moments,
and even the later ones.
During this turn-beginning, Yan maintains his gaze on the co-participants,
monitoring them: he can see them progressively looking at him. As a conse-
quence, when all look at him, he gazes away from the group and turns up to the
noticed object again. Moreover, he begins to point at it. Both his gaze toward the
object and the pointing gesture work as instructions to look in a certain direc-
tion (Hindmarsh and Heath 2000). They are produced as soon as the collective
gaze has moved to him, thus achieving the reconfiguration of the interactional
space as a preliminary to the indexical reference (Mondada 2014a). The next in-
teractional task for Yan consists in guiding their gaze from him as a speaker and
pointing them toward the object he is pointing at, as observable in the next ex-
tract (and ELAN transcript, Figure 11.7).
Extract 1.3—line 3
3 YAN: (0.6) ces plans là où on est: dans une cour:be,
Fig. 11.8
Figure 11.7 ELAN Transcript Extract 1.3, line 3
After the first part of the initial cleft and pseudo-cleft construction, Yan pauses
(0.6), before engaging in the specification of the initial and projected prospective
indexical “it.” Just before he utters this second part, he looks down at the group
again: in this way, he monitors the gaze of the co-participants and is able to see
that they have progressively looked up in the instructed direction. While Sophie
and Elise are the first to look up the former during the pause, the latter at the
exact moment at which the second part of the description begins, Jean looks up
only later on, while the description of the object is already unfolding.
This late gaze might be understood in relation to the fact that Jean had already
seen Yan’s looking up and had already looked up (see Figure 11.1, 20.7–21.7
seconds, on p. 298); moreover, as the guide of the visit and expert in the visited
building, he displays in this way that he knows what Yan is talking about, thus
gazing at the pointing speaker rather than at the pointed-at object.
Again, the progressivity of Yan’s action is adjusted to the embodied responses
of the co-participants: until the beginning of the description’s second part, he
was walking down toward them; after the pause, he stops, and while he describes
the roof, he even walks back up the upper part of the ramp. If walking down
Figure 11.8
adjusts to the move forward of the co-participants, walking up again and back-
ward is a way of stopping that progressivity and offering an alternative dynamic
ecology for the ongoing action.
At this point, the description of the noticed and pointed-at object is defin-
itively launched. First, the mention of the object with a double deictic expres-
sion (“ces plans là”/“these plans there”) constitutes an extra invitation to look at
it. Second, its expansion in the form of a locative relative clause (“où”/“where”)
gives the opportunity for Jean’s late gaze up to join the other participants in their
posture of shared attention. Finally, all of the participants look up toward the
pointed-at referent (Figure 11.8).
Furthermore, the locative clause is further expanded in a list of features char-
acterizing the “plans,” accompanied by some iconic gesticulations. At this point,
another issue emerges for Yan: until now, the responses of the co-participants
have been implemented in the embodied form of an instructed looking by them
aligning with his instructions and looking at the referent pointed at. But they
have not yet produced any verbal response. By expanding his description, Yan
creates further opportunities for a substantial response, which would not only
bodily align with his action but also verbally affiliate with it (see the ELAN tran-
script, Figure 11.9).
Extract 1.4—lines 3–9

3 YAN: (0.6) ces plans là où on est: dans une cour:be,
4 avec eh
with eh
5 (0.3)
6 JEA: ouais (ouais)
yeah (yeah)
7 YAN: les deux aut’ courbes qui repartent,
the two other curves that go away,
8 celle-ci qui vient, les fenêtres,
this one that comes in, the windows,
9 SOP? hm
Figure 11.9 ELAN Transcript Extract 1.4, lines 3-9
Responses to Yan’s description remain minimal. Jean responds after the pause
following the first part of the locative relative: at this point, Yan has projected a
continuation (“avec eh”/“with eh”) which is not immediately followed (see the
pause of 0.6). By responding with “ouais (ouais)”/“yeah (yeah),” Jean displays
that for him the description is complete, for all practical purposes, within an ad-
ditional manifestation of him as a knowing recipient.
Nonetheless, Yan continues, ignoring this response and implicitly orienting
to the other, non-knowing, recipients (Goodwin 1979). They have responded
in an embodied way first by looking up, but then looked back at him, without
any verbal response. Quite the opposite, at the beginning of the expansion fol-
lowing the 0.6-second pause, and initiating a list of features, Jean looks in front
of him and walks down; Elise looks in front of her, still standing; and Sophie
walks backward a bit later on. The two latter participants orient to a double
possible progression of the activity: by standing (Elise) and by continuing to
look at Yan (Sophie), they orient toward Yan; by looking forward (Elise) and
by beginning to walk (Sophie), they orient toward the progressivity of the visit.
The backward walk is an instance of body torque (Schegloff 1998) in which the
co-participant both looks at Yan and restores the progressivity of the visit.
These movements are seen by Yan when he gazes down toward the group, on
the last item of his list: at this point, all of the participants are at least partially
oriented toward moving forward. Moreover, the only response he gets is a min-
imal “mh” from Sophie. Yan aligns with the projection of the completion of the
sequence by his recipients and organizes a proper completion of his turn (see the
ELAN transcript Figure 11.10).

10 YAN: c’est des x—c’est des détails que j’adore hein.
it’s some x—it’s details that I love uh.
11 (0.6)
12 JEA: ouais
yeah
Yan organizes the end of his noticing by producing the final construction
(“c’est des details que j’adore”/“it’s details that I love”; literally in French, “I
adore”) which recycles the elements of the initial one (“ce que j’—moi j’adore”/
“what I—me I love”). But while the initial pseudo-cleft was prospectively organ-
ized, projecting more to come, the final cleft construction is retrospectively or-
ganized, synthesizing the previous description within the formulation “c’est des
details”/“it’s details.” In this way, Yan organizes a global pivot format (what I love
is N =N it’s details that I love) that closes his turn. In the absence of any substan-
tial response, he produces a formal closing of the emergent Gestalt. Moreover, he
begins again to walk forward and to look forward, bodily orienting to the pro-
gressivity of the activity.
The co-participants orient to him: Jean pivots and looks at him, Sophie stops
her walk and also looks at him. Both of them stop and bodily orient to him,
turning their back toward the direction of the progression of the visit. In this way,
they wait for Yan. Jean also produces some final responses (“ouais”/“yeah” and
“>oui oui< c’est ça.”/“>yes yes< that’s it.”), which confirms what Yan has just said,
rather than acknowledging his talk as new.
The solution to the practical problem encountered by Yan consists in
accountably organizing his action. The recipient-designed character of that
action is visible in the fact that prior to delivering his utterance, Yan checks
and monitors the co-participants’ positions and movements. Given the una-
vailability of the co-participants at turn-initial position, Yan uses a delaying
and projecting construction: he situatedly exploits the projective features of
a pseudo-cleft (opens a frame for more to come; cf. Günthner and Hopper
2010; Hopper 2004). The first part is delayed by the coordination of bodies and
glances; the second part emerges contingently by adjusting to the recipient’s
responsiveness and attention. His instruction to look at the architectural detail
is designed as finely coordinated with the movements and emergent common
focus of attention. The turn is brought to completion when the co-participants
look away and continue to walk. The syntactic and bodily temporal features
are accountably coordinated and assembled by Yan and responded to by the
co-participants.
This piece of data shows how an action, a noticing by a participant, is for-
matted by carefully monitoring the co-participants and their fine-grained set of
responses, to which the unfolding action is reflexively adjusted. Although Yan’s
turn is not responded to in a substantial verbal way, and indeed the speaker
orients to that, it is treated and responded to in an embodied way. Yan’s action
emerges as an instruction to look and the responses align with it as instructed
looking, progressively constituting the conditions for joint attention toward the
pointed-at referent.
The analysis describes how a series of practical problems is treated in me-
thodic ways by the speaker mobilizing and selecting multimodal resources,
arranged in order to achieve practical tasks such as getting the attention of the
co-participants, constituting a shared object of vision, suspending the progres-
sivity of a competing activity, expanding the current activity, and occasioning
new opportunities to respond, organizing the closing of the activity in the ab-
sence of substantial responses, etc.
Intermediary Discussion
The preceding analysis has shown how a participant mobilizes and orients to
various multimodal details, such as grammatical constructions, lexical choices,
gaze, different types of gesture, body postures, mobility, in order to produce a
noticing; and how co-participants respond with their gaze, their body postures,
their movements.
The analysis of an action lasting about 15 seconds has shown the complexity of
the multimodal Gestalts that are progressively and reflexively achieved, as well as
the intricate relationships between the ecology of the action, the situated contin-
gencies, the reflexivity of action and the (non)responses it gets, etc. This analysis
accounts for the indexicality of social action, as well as for the fundamental so-
cial and interactional reflexive organization of action, even when it is apparently
done by a speaker without much verbal responsiveness from the hearers. This
analysis also shows how action is reflexively built by integrating the continuous
embodied responses of the co-participants, and not only by taking into account
the “next turn” they could produce.
The issue discussed in this chapter concerns the very possibility of at the
same time, respecting the indexicality, specificity, and complexity of human
action and exploring its methodic and systematic character. In order to do so,
more instances are needed. The issue is how to build a (small) collection even
for phenomena that are quite specific, complex, and situated. In this condi-
tion, encountering a second instance is not straightforward. The more situ-
ated details and multimodal practices are considered, the more difficult it is
to find a similar case. This nourishes the skepticism of some scholars about
fine-grained multimodal analyses regarding making collections difficult if not
impossible.
So, how does one go from a first to a second instance? Searching for other
exemplars of noticings (i.e., for the same type of action) is not enough, since
they can be produced in very different contexts and with very different mul-
timodal resources and formats. In a similar way, the issue is not to search
for other cases of pseudo-cleft constructions in order to build a collection of
syntactic forms. This could be interesting for the grammatical study of the
construction in social interaction, but not necessarily for the type of action
documented in the first example. Rather, this action concerns instructions
to look at something in the co-present environment, organized as emer-
gent embodied Gestalts sensitive to the complex spatial arrangement of the
participants, and their partial (un)availability.
Interestingly, Garfinkel himself has discussed the problem of how to go from

one instance to another one. In an audio-recorded conversation with Doug
Macbeth, Garfinkel speaks with great clarity about the issue, in a way that
highlights how to build a collection, as well as what a collection is not.
getting access to o:ne, (0.7) no matter what, (0.3) be accessed (0.5)

get you access to: (0.8) the mo:re than one
[...]
there’re been others (0.6) not like that, but. (0.3) others of this sort namely, (0.6)
finding the one, [ . . . ] leads to: (1.0) ahm (0.5) seeing, that there can be indefi-
nitely many others.
[...]
you’re not yet saying that they’re all instances of a cla:ss, you are not dealing with
a class, you’re dealing with a one and (0.5) the way (0.4) it (0.4) provides for what
a next could be:
[...]
(this could be) another version of what a collection (2.4) is
(0.8)
and it’s not the classic notion of a collection, where you give the necessary
and special conditions for (0.5) eh for truly and properly inclusion and then
exclusion
(Garfinkel, audio recording of a conversation with
Doug Macbeth, courtesy DM)
A Second Instance
A second instance was found in the same data set, which will be analyzed both in
detail and in comparison with the previous example.
“Moi c’que j’adore/c’est . . .”
The participants have entered a classroom within the same building. Jean, Sophie,
and Elise stay near the door, while Yan walks across the room and approaches a
window. He contemplates the building’s architecture as it is visible from that view-
point. After a silent glance through the window, he produces a noticing, prefaced
by the same construction as in the first case.
As in the previous case, I reproduce first the verbal transcript of the entire
extract.
Extract 2.0—verbal transcript (Cep2/15.27—Clun1.11.30)

1 (10.6)
2 YAN: pis moi c’qu’j’adore, c’est que: à chaq’endroit où on est
and me what I adore it’s that at each place where we are
3 à l’intérieur, on a une conscien:ce du propre bâtiment,
inside we have a consciousness of the proper building
4 (0.9)
5 et c’est euh:: c’est un jeu, qui: °>qui qui<° qu’il
and it’s eh:: it’s a game that °>that that<° that he
6 affectionne beaucoup, j’ai l’impression, ↓pa’ce que:
likes very much, I guess, ‘cause
7 (0.8)
8 YAN: alors [bon on est] toujours un peu tous sensibles
so [well we are] always a bit all sensitive
9 ELI: [ah c’est vrai]
[oh that’s true]
10 YAN: nous les archis à c::—[ce genre d’détail,
we the architects to th::—[this kind of detail
11 JEA: [oui
[yes
12 YAN: mais c’est °vrai ↓que:°
but it’s °true that:°
13 (0.2)
14 JEA: de voir le bâtiment de l’int[érieur
to see the building from ins[ide
Yan initiates a new sequence with a turn beginning, using a similar con-
struction as in the first instance, a pseudo-cleft using also the same lexical
verbal form, “moi c’que j’adore, c’est que:”/“me what I adore, it’s that.” This
projects the description of what he sees from the window. At line 3, his turn
could be syntactically complete, but the prosody projects more to come, and
none of the participants responds. After a longish pause (line 4), he continues
with an “et”/“and”–prefaced cleft sentence, referring to the architect of the
building and finishing in an incomplete way with “parce que:”/“because.”
What it projects is not implemented in the next unit, after a pause (line 8).
Rather, he adds a comment referring to his own professional category, “we
the architects” (line 10), which is overlapped by a first response, from Elise,
aligning with his previous description and producing a change-of-state token
(Heritage 1984a) (line 9) and an aligning response from Jean (line 11). The
unit is left unfinished (line 12).
After a short pause, Jean provides a more substantial response, beginning with
a conjunction (“de”/“to,” line 14) which operates as a syntactical link with the
previous turn and expands it collaboratively, recycling some preceding resources
that Yan used (cf. line 3).
Contrary to what happened in the first instance, in the second one Yan’s de-
scription is substantially responded to by the co-participants and the episode
continues for a while.
But the initial problem Yan faces is similar to the former one: a dis-
persed arrangement of the bodies of the co-p articipants, not propitious
for a noticing or for an action requiring joint attention. Yan treats this
problem with similar practices to those in the first instance, namely spe-
cific syntactic resources initiating the turn, whose projective potential
and emergent unfolding adjusts to the progressive reorientation of their
bodies and gaze.
Projections, Emergent Temporality, and the Progressive

Constitution of an Interactional Space Adequate for the
Ongoing Activity
We join the action as the group has entered the classroom. Jean, Elise, and Sophie
stand near the entrance, inspecting it without engaging more fully with the
room. Displaying that the space can be globally apprehended from the entrance,
the guide, Jean, remains close to the door. Quite the opposite, Yan walks through
the room and approaches the window opposite the door (Figure 11.11). In this
way, he displays that there are alternative viewpoints from which the architecture
can be appreciated.
Having reached the window, Yan engages in the silent contemplation of
the view.
Figure 11.11
The beginning of the ELAN transcript (Figure 11.12) shows different positions
of the co-participants. After a few seconds, Yan, who was looking through the
window, turns toward the co-participants and sees them standing near the en-
trance of the room

1 (10.6)
2 YAN: pis moi c’que j’adore, c’est que:
and me what I adore it’s that
Figure 11.13
Figure 11.14
Just before initiating his noticing, Yan turns from the window (Figure 11.13)
toward the co-participants; he sees that they are far away and that the architec-
tural scene he is looking at is not accessible to them (Figure 11.14).
So, prior to launching his turn, Yan checks the position of his imminent
recipients. His choice of a pseudo-cleft construction at turn-beginning selects
a strongly projective linguistic resource in a context in which the interactional
space is fragmented, projecting more to come and providing an opportu-
nity to reconfigure that interactional space. The co-participants respond in an
embodied way: at the end of the first part of the pseudo-cleft, they are beginning
to move (see ELAN transcript in Figure 11.15):

2 YAN: pis moi c’qu’j’adore, c’est que: à chaq’endroit où on est
and me what I adore it’s that at each place where we are
3 à l’intérieur, on a une conscien:ce du propre bâtiment,
inside we have a consciousness of the proper building
4 (0.9)
The co-participants respond to Yan’s noticing, by walking toward the window

as the second, projected, part of noticing begins. Sophie responds immediately,
as soon as the first part is achieved; Jean a bit later, as the second part has just
begun; Elise in the middle. As soon as Elise begins to move, too, Yan reorients
his head and gaze, no longer monitoring the participants but turning toward the
architecture, pointing at its detail with his chin.
By responding with a walk toward the speaker and what he is looking at, the
recipients treat the noticing not only as a personal comment, but also as an in-
vitation to share his view and to look at it with him. From then on, the practical
problem Yan faces concerns the coordination between his emergent description
and the trajectory of the walk of his recipients. At a first possible syntactical com-
pletion, before the long pause (0.9), the participants are still in the middle of the
room (Figure 11.16).
Figure 11.16
Yan’s turn adjusts to this progressive movement by adding further details, refer-
ring to the “game” liked by the architect of the building. This leaves extra time for
the participants to walk through the room (see ELAN transcript in Figure 11.17):

4 (0.9)
5 et c’est euh:: c’est un jeu, qui: °>qui qui<° qu’il
and it’s eh:: it’s a game that °>that that<° that he
6 affectionne beaucoup, j’ai l’impression, ↓pa’ce que:
likes very much, I guess, ‘cause
7 (0.8)
At the end of the expansion referring to the author of the building, Yan,
who is still gazing at the group, sees that they have almost reached the
window. At this point, his turn is left unfinished, with “pa’c’que”/“’cause” and
a pause follows (0.8), while he moves his gaze from the participants to the
window again.
He begins a new unit (see ELAN transcript, Figures 11.17, 11.18):

7 (0.8)
8 YAN: alors [bon on est] toujours un peu tous sensibles
so [well we are] always a bit all sensitive
9 ELI: [ah c’est vrai]
[oh that’s true]
10 YAN: nous les archis à c::—[ce genre d’détail,
we the architects to th::—[this kind of detail
11 JEA: [oui
[yes
During the pause (0.8), Jean and Sophie have reached the window. Elise
continues to come closer. Sophie is the first to respond to Yan: she stands
in front of the window, and utters a change-of-state token as well as an as-

sessment, confirming Yan’s description from the new perspective she has
acquired.
Yan, having seen them now sharing his position toward the building, turns back
to the window and adds a comment about himself as belonging to the category of
the architects and thus professionally appreciating this kind of visual perspective.
This gives them further time to look out and also instructs their vision: Yan is of-
fering to share with them a way of professionally looking at the architecture.
At this point, the participants are rearranged in a new interactional space that
permits them to provide a substantial response, now having a direct visual expe-
rience of what Yan is talking about: Jean engages in a collaborative turn and Yan
responds to him, further expanding the episode.
The two instances studied in this chapter constitute a locally assembled
accountable Gestalt contexture (Garfinkel 2002; Gurwitsch 1964): a new se-
quence is initiated, turn-beginning is formatted with a strongly projective
construction projecting more to come; the turn unfolds, instructing how a
new referent has to be looked at in the co-present environment, in a context
of dispersion of bodies and gaze of the co-participants. The format consti-
tuted by a projective turn component, followed by a projected second part, is
temporally sensitive to what the co-participants do responsively, both in talk
and in their embodied conduct: it reflexively achieves the establishment of a
common focus of attention, a reposition and movement of the others’ bodies,
by adjusting and coordinating with the co-participants’ conduct (gaze, re-
sponsiveness, etc.).
Thus, Yan’s noticing is organized in such a way that its temporal sequen-
tial progressive unfolding adjusts to the temporality of the other participants
walking through the room, both arranging and delaying further slots in which
a response might be provided. The use of linguistic resources like the pseudo-
cleft both projects and delays the description of the view to be seen, consti-
tuting a powerful way to wait for and to guide the instructed shared vision of
the recipients.
Discussion and Conclusion
These two instances are similar in their beginning and different in their outcome.
In both cases, a participant initiates a new action, a noticing, and a new sequence,
in a context in which the co-participants are dispersed and at a distance within
the surrounding environment, within a fragmented interactional space, and in
which he is not expected to say anything. This constitutes an ecology that is not
very favorable for a joint action.
Before initiating his noticing, the speaker redirects his gaze from the details
he was looking at to the co-participants: in this way, he checks their availability,
orienting to it as a possible condition for his action. Indeed, his turn begins with
a complex syntactical construction, which being articulated in one first part,
projecting a second one, organizes the unfolding of the action within time, lit-
erally giving time to the participants to align and to respond. So, the choice of
linguistic resources for formatting the turn is directly related to the inspection
of the interactional space; the progression of the turn is embedded in the gaze
alternating between the described referent and the participants, being reflex-
ively adjusted with the monitoring of the participants’ movements. The noticing
emerges as an action that is not merely communicating a personal feeling of the
speaker, but as an instruction to look at the environment constituting an instance
of instructed vision and even professional vision.
The co-participants respond in various ways: by stopping their trajectories,
reorienting their bodies, looking in an instructed way, and producing verbal
tokens. In this respect, the two instances differ. In the first, the co-participants
can see at a glance what Yan is referring to, and they momentarily suspend the
progression of their walk (as well as the visit), though they immediately resume
it. The noticing is responded to as an insertion in the progressivity of the visit; it
constitutes a delay by a delayed participant, an obstacle to the visit’s progressivity.
In the second instance, the referent that is noticed cannot be seen from where the
co-participants are. The progression of the visit is suspended and delayed, and
they engage in a new activity, aligning with what is proposed by Yan, an invita-
tion to bodily engage in a different view of the room, walking through it instead
of staying at its entrance. The noticing is responded to as an invitation to share
the professional vision of the architect and to redirect the bodies to do so. This
also ends in a general discussion, prolonging the episode even more.
The two instances open up for an analysis of the practices by which people
look at things together, respond to noticings by sharing the perspective of the
person initiating the sequence, and engage together in instructed vision. Joint
attention—following the gaze of the other, seeing together—is an interactional
accomplishment, which emerges in time, through the reflexive organization of
turns/actions and the responses they get, in a way that is organizationally sensi-
tive to the local changing ecology.
Together, these two cases constitute an incipient collection of turn formats
used for introducing a new object, instructing the co-participants how to look
at it, analyzed as emergent Gestalts. They both are sensitive to the local con-
tingencies of action in context (indexicality) and they present systematic, me-
thodically assembled, ordered practices for dealing with the practical problems
encountered in situ (orderliness). The incipient collection shows the challenges
raised by the analysis of multimodality: multimodal details are possibly infinite,
although only a limited range of them are considered as relevant and oriented
to by the participants; they constitute complex multimodal Gestalts clustering
various embodied and linguistic features unfolding within intertwined (related
but not isochronic) temporalities; these Gestalts are locally assembled by the
participants in a way that is contingent on the local material environment and
that shows the continuity between the specific formats of embodied conduct and
their ecology.
All these characteristics build highly specific contextures of multimodal re-
sources that seem to escape any generalizability across instances. However, the
analysis of these two instances has also shown that specificity and systematicity of
conducts are not mutually exclusive dimensions to consider, but different faces of the
same coin. Multimodal Gestalts are established as responses to practical problems
and as implementations of recognizable actions: they are recipient-designed and
thus adjusted to the local dynamic embodied-participation framework; they are
responded to and are formatted in a way that reflexively considers others’ responses,
embedding them in the emergent action formation; various multimodal elements
of conduct have a sequential implicativeness that can be responded to at different
moments, by diverse multimodal practices and by different co-participants, showing
how complex sequential organization can be (characterized by multiple temporali-
ties that run in parallel, articulating both multiple sequentialities and simultaneities;
Mondada 2018). These principles of sequential organization (Garfinkel 2002; Rawls
2005; Schegloff 2007) constitute the foundations of the methodicity of human ac-
tion, as they are oriented to by the co-participants/members and are documented by
the analysts looking over their shoulders.
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University Press.
12
Recovering the Work of a Discovering
Science with a Video Camera in Hand
The Electronically Probed/Visually
Discovered Spectrum
Philippe Sormani
Introduction
What is the work of a discovering science?

—Garfinkel et al. (1989:2)
Ethnomethodological studies of scientific work have probed the routine

practices of various natural sciences and mathematical domains (e.g., Livingston
1986; Lynch 1985; Lynch and Sharrock 2003). Yet, and despite many program-
matic statements (e.g., Garfinkel and Liberman 2007), these studies seem not or
only rarely to have investigated the core phenomenon of just how such routine
work is drawn upon, in and for the local production of scientific (or mathemat-
ical) findings of current disciplinary interest. Even the canonical exception in
this respect, Harold Garfinkel’s and his colleagues’ “pulsar paper” (published in
1981), has been criticized for not delivering “a descriptive account of just how a
discovery was actually done” (Koschmann and Zemel 2009:202). Incidentally,
a similar criticism has been leveled at laboratory ethnography, for failing to de-
scribe the local construction of scientific facts (Doing 2008). In turn, this chapter
describes the local production of an empirical discovery in current physics: multi-
band superconductivity in lead molybdenum sulphide (PbMo6S8). The chapter
thus fills the indicated gap in the literature. To begin with, however, some histor-
ical background is in order.1
The “freezing physics” of superconductivity has charted a fascinating, twisted,
and largely unpredictable course in the twentieth century (cf. Blundell 2009;
van Delft 2007; Matricon and Waysand 1994). Superconductivity, the property
of conducting electricity without resistance (while expelling magnetic fields),
was first discovered in 1911 at very low temperatures (>–269°C) in a mercury

WORK OF A DISCOVERING SCIENCE 323
sample. For more than 40 years, however, no model could account for this aston-
ishing material property. This changed in the 1950s, when a theoretical model
was developed that succeeded in explaining superconductivity in terms of “paired
electrons” which, at temperatures close to absolute zero (–273.15°C), would form,
slip through the crystalline structure of metallic compounds, and create an elec-
tric current circulating without resistance (cf. Blundell 2009:48–65). The model
also predicted a threshold temperature (of ca. –253°C) above which superconduc-
tivity would cease to exist. In 1986, a Swiss physicist and his German colleague,
K. A. Müller and J. G. Bednorz, managed to find a ceramic compound which,
upon repeated inspection, displayed superconducting properties at –243°C (that
is, 10° above the predicted threshold temperature). The discovered anomaly
gained them the Nobel Prize in 1987 and gave new impetus to the field of super-
conductivity (cf. Nowotny and Felt 1997). Ever since, the discovered “high-tem-
perature superconductivity” has remained a mystery (cf. Cho 2006), yet a highly
promising one (notably in view of energy-saving electricity grids).
It is against this background that the members of the laboratory studied in
this chapter would conduct their inquiries on superconducting materials. Lab
members adopted a strategy of diversification, investigating a range of materials
both below and above the classic, yet falsely predicted, threshold temperature.
For example, PbMo6S8 had at first been found to display “single-band” supercon-
ductivity (i.e., at one energy level) below the stated threshold temperature (at –
271.35°C). This initial finding constituted a potential anomaly, as it did not fit the
canonical model from the 1950s (which would have predicted superconductivity
at several energy levels, cf. Dubois et al. 2007). Yet subsequent measurements at
the lab, conducted on related materials under more stringent conditions (e.g.,
high vacuum), had suggested that this anomaly might be a methodological arti-
fact. The presently examined experiment—the local spectroscopy of PbMo6S8—
was then designed to answer the open question, as an experimentum crucis of
sorts. Indeed, the experiment should either confirm the previous anomaly (po-
tentially leading to a theoretical innovation) or produce a new, yet prosaically
empirical discovery (insofar as it would prove consistent with, if not confirm, the
canonical model).2
Accordingly, the experiment to be analyzed in this chapter was to determine
what kind of superconductivity characterized PbMo6S8, “single-” or “multi-
band.” The kind of discovery to be made would hinge upon that determination,
which in turn was to be made in terms of a local spectroscopy, which involves
subjecting a sample to a range of bias voltages, as the tunneling current could be
varied in that sense, and recording the resulting pattern of (super-)conductivity.
More specifically, a “local” spectroscopy designates any such measurement that
is made at a particular position above the sample surface (where the measured
values are derived from the varying tunneling current, It).
The experiment was made and filmed during its making on November 9, 2008.
The experimental physicist in charge, identified as Pete in this chapter, had man-
ifestly discovered PbMo6S8 to transport electricity without resistance at several
energy levels or “bands”—hence “multi-band superconductivity.” Luckily, I had
managed to be present at the lab that Sunday morning and film the discovery’s
local production, before arranging to engage in its tentative re-enactment at a
later stage. This chapter, accordingly, describes how the empirical discovery was
made, while making explicit the heuristic interest of its tentative re-enactment
to understand the discovery’s initial production. In short, the chapter offers a
practice-based video analysis (Sormani 2016). Finally, the chapter reflects upon
the “discovery status” of the experimental finding in physics, as well as technical
self-instruction in the vein of Garfinkel’s (2002a, 2002b, 2002c) later work as an
integral part of the proposed video analysis and ethnomethodological inquiry
more broadly.
STM of Complex Superconductors: Preliminary Technicalities
As its name and acronym suggest, “scanning tunneling microscopy” (STM)

involves a special kind of microscope, operating through the tunneling of
electrons, which allows the microscope to scan the surface of a conducting
material (gold, graphite, or more complex semi-or indeed superconducting
materials). The basic operating principle of STM consists in having a sharp me-
tallic tip, resembling a needle, scanning over the sample surface of the selected
material. Provided that the tip is scanning over the surface at a very close distance,
yet without touching the surface (at a distance of 0.1 nm to 1 nm), a so-called
tunneling current may flow across the minor spacing between tip and sample.
On the basis of the measured variations in that current—or, alternatively, in suc-
cessive tip-sample distances—the topographic and electronic properties of the
sample can be reconstituted and represented (via a computer program, linked
to the scanning microscope, and requiring its continuous monitoring). “Local
spectroscopy,” in turn, involves probing the electronic properties of a selected
sample position at different bias voltages (see the following section). Simply put,
the STM tip operates as a flexible probe with atomic resolution and electronic
sensibility under the scrupulous gaze of the experimenter (for a succinct exposi-
tion of its quantum mechanics, see Güntherodt and Wiesendanger 1992).
To make STM measurements on superconducting materials, these have to be
examined under special experimental conditions. In addition to the vibration
isolation of the microscopic unit (if only to avoid its probe “crashing” into the
sample), the measurement area inside of the STM facility, a two-story assembly
of experimental and monitoring units, has to be cooled down to at least –135°C,
the threshold temperature below which superconductivity can currently be

measured (cf. Blundell 2009:108; Sormani 2014:25–60). At the studied labora-
tory, experimentalists were first concerned with placing their (potentially) su-
perconducting samples downstairs and inside the microscopic unit, and then
launching the cooling process of the measurement area, before taking their seat
upstairs in front of the computer to monitor subsequent STM measurements,
topographic and spectroscopic. This is also what Pete and I did on Sunday
morning of November 9, 2008.
Recovering “Discovering Work”: A Practice-Based

Video Analysis
At around 11:30 a.m., Pete lifted his arms in celebration: “YES!” His low-tem-
perature STM, alias Aurora, had just triggered the long-sought and hitherto un-
known spectrum of PbMo6S8: its signature “double gap” spectrum as a multi-band
superconductor (see Appendix). The empirical discovery was manifestly made,
in situ and in vivo, and Pete’s instant celebration suggested that it had physical
significance. So did his initial acknowledgment of our shared moment, on the
one hand, and a later observation in the light of additional spectra commented
upon in the subsequently published paper, on the other: “the moment when we
discovered multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8 together was truly special”
(Petrović 2010:165); “such a dramatic spectral variation as a function of local
topography has not previously been observed in any other superconductor”
(Petrović et al. 2011:2). We shall return to this suggestion of disciplinary rele-
vance in the concluding section of the chapter. This core section of the chapter,
in turn, describes the local production of the electronically probed/visually dis-
covered spectrum. The section’s key interest is thus similar to that of the seminal
“pulsar paper” (cf. Garfinkel et al. 1981), as the paraphrase of the latter’s central
question best suggests: Just what did the electronically probed/visually discovered
spectrum consist of as Pete and Phil’s Sunday morning work, on November 9, 2008?
Yet the paraphrase has been twisted, too: it marks my practical involvement in
discovering work. What’s the point of marking this reflexive involvement? What’s
the point of re-examining discovering work in superconductivity research that
way? The basic idea was to exploit my “technical idiocy” for heuristic purposes—
that is, to turn the technical difficulties of my practical involvement and tenta-
tive re-enactment of the initial discovery into “tutorial problems,” problems that
highlight “members’ discipline-specific procedures” (Garfinkel 2002c:145, em-
phasis in original). Their distinctive mastery, in a nutshell, was to appear against
the background of my technical incompetency. The latter, indeed, constitutes “an
opportunity to see what [an] expert [would] ‘assume’ and ‘take for granted’ as
the most ordinary, pervasive, and characteristic features of [her] work practice”
(Livingston 2008:132). In particular, the tentative re-enactment of Pete’s experi-
ment will allow us to make explicit one key feature and basic requirement of his
local practice: the constitutive contribution of its technical procedures, as they
did and had to contribute to the local production of their intended Gestalt, the
long-sought and hitherto unknown “double gap” spectrum of PbMo6S8.
As we shall see, each of the technical procedures, enacted by Pete and exhibited
via his STM equipment, was achieved as a recursive three-part routine: a “field of
view” (Sherman 2011) would be established first, followed by an action engaged
in that field, and the evaluation of its displayed result, prior to the next procedure,
engaged in similar fashion. This three-part routine was (and had to be) made
visible in its course, via the equipment used by Pete. Yet this manifest three-part
routine begs the question of its constitutive contribution to the unfolding exper-
iment: How was each procedure achieved, not for its own sake or technical cor-
rectness per se, but for the purpose of the local spectroscopy of PbMo6S8? How
would Pete achieve those procedures, task by task, so as to discover its multi-
band superconductivity? To answer these questions, the ensuing video analysis
will be practice-based and proceed in three steps, procedure by procedure. First,
a transcript-assisted analysis will be offered of each experimental procedure.
Second, and by drawing upon a descriptive “Vignette” for each step, I will report
upon my tentative re-enactment of each procedure. Third, the problems encoun-
tered in the re-enactment will be drawn upon to clarify the initial experiment, es-
pecially with respect to the constitutive contribution of each technical procedure
to the local production of its empirical discovery: multi-band superconductivity
in PbMo6S8.3
The [Tip-Sample Approach]: A First Tutorial Problem in STM
To set out with STM measurements, tip and sample must be brought into ex-
tremely close—nanometric vicinity—with one another. Only within the minute
interval between the tip, acting as the probe, and a selected sample can its (po-
tentially) superconducting properties be probed, due to the so established “tun-
neling current” from which they are derived. To achieve this feat, Pete would
engage in a two-step procedure: first, engage in a [[manual approach]] in the
course of which he would monitor the progressively approaching tip with the
help of its mirror image, a mirror image that gradually appears on the sample
surface when the task is accomplished and correctly monitored with a magni-
fying lens (Sormani 2014:Chapter 4); second, Pete would control the subsequent
nanometric steps of the tip in approaching the sample with the help of an elec-
tronic feedback loop. Sitting at the computer of his STM facility Aurora, Pete
would monitor and explain this [[automatic approach]] to me, as can be gleaned
from Excerpt 1.4
(a)
Figure 12.1 Excerpt 1: Launching, monitoring, and commenting the [[automatic

approach]]
As the excerpt shows, Pete does much more than he can explain in so many
words. He surely launches, monitors, and comments on the [[automatic ap-
proach]] in terms of the three-part routine outlined in the introduction to this
(b)
Figure 12.1 Continued
section. Let us attempt a first analysis of the observed three-part routine, and
then, in Vignette 1, examine the ethnographic annotations deriving from my
novice questions put to Pete (see my successive action descriptions in double
parentheses in the transcript).
Regarding the [[automatic approach]] as a three-part routine, we may note
that Pete first formulates the return to a previously selected tip-position above
the sample surface (line 002), while turning his gaze to the computer screen
(003), thereby fixing the relevant “field of view” (the “approach” window opened
in the STM onscreen interface). Second, he formulates the action engaged in that
field, the tip approach (010–012, #1). Third, he evaluates and formulates, while
observing (015–018, #2, 023, 026), the result of the approach, as displayed on the
oscilloscope above the computer screen (his “field of view” having been extended
in the course of the engaged procedure). Finally, and despite his manifestly neg-
ative evaluation, he decides to engage in the next experimental procedure: “we
will try to put it anyway” (037). Why?5
What were the local grounds, in other words, for Pete’s experimental noncha-
lance? Why would he envisage a first [local spectroscopy] at all (027–037), given
that he himself had judged experimental conditions desperately poor (015–026)?

On the basis of my “ethnographic” annotations, readers may observe that Pete
uses the various parts of his STM facility. First, he uses its rack [A]‌to ascertain
the nanometric height at which the tip is positioned with respect to the sample
(i.e., the tip’s “Z position,” 001). Second, he uses his computer [B] to launch the
[[automatic approach]] of tip and sample (003–007), before using it to prepare
and position a first spectroscopy (his “spectro,” 027–044, #4). Third, Pete mani-
festly uses the oscilloscope [C] to monitor and evaluate the initially launched task,
the [[automatic approach]] (008–026). The previously described, yet only par-
tially verbalized three-part routine appears thus as Pete’s instrumental practice.
But what were Pete’s local grounds, in particular, to envisage a first spectroscopy
through this three-part routine?6
The re-enactment of the task at hand—the [[automatic approach]] of tip and
sample—may afford us with an instructive answer to the open question, a “tu-
torial problem” in Garfinkel’s sense. Consider the following vignette of my task
re-enactment, two weeks after Pete’s initial experiment.
Vignette 1: Re-enacting the [[Automatic Approach]]
Upon Pete’s invitation, I take his seat at the STM facility Aurora. Equipped with
the video camera in my right hand and the detailed transcript of his experiment
in the left, I start reading out and following the transcript as a script, as a set of
written instructions to reproduce the [[automatic approach]], the task now at
hand. At the same time, I film my first attempt at task re-enactment from within
its tricky course. Fortunately, Pete is overseeing my tribulations at his STM fa-
cility! First, I read out loud “we get back to where we were before” and then,
hesitantly, “clicks tip approach button” which, eventually, I do—to have the [[au-
tomatic approach]] initiated. Then, I direct my gaze and searching camera to the
oscilloscope. What’s there to be seen, if not filmed? Nothing yet, it seems. Indeed,
Pete invites me to check the tip position as indicated elsewhere, not on the os-
cilloscope, but on the rack to the right of it. As I do so, he asks me: “Did you see
the jump?” Apparently, the oscilloscope has just indicated the relevant phenom-
enon! Well, I missed it. So we redo the approach, and Pete shows me what to look
out for and film: a “downward jump” on the oscilloscope, indicating tunneling
current detection.
What Pete showed me that I missed—the “downward jump” on the oscil-
loscope—had afforded him with the local grounds—a detected tunneling
current—to proceed with his spectroscopy. Conversely, my tentative re-enact-
ment and manifest failure at spotting the relevant phenomenon afford us with
a “look again” procedure (Watson 1998), a resource to re-examine Pete’s ini-
tial [[automatic approach]] and its first transcription (see Excerpt 1). Consider
Figure 12.2 The [[automatic approach]] and its oscilloscopic monitoring

(Pete’s initial achievement re-examined)
the series of films stills in Figure 12.2 of Pete’s approach procedure, as I could
assemble the series by drawing upon my task re-enactment as an instructive
resource.
The film stills in Figure 12.2 of the [[automatic approach]] document its
monitored achievement by Pete (1a–1f), including his negative assessment of
its apparent result (as facially expressed in 1f). First, it may be noted that Pete,
after having clicked “approach” (see Excerpt 1, line 006), not only leans back-
ward (ibid., 008), but also, as the first film still suggests (1a), monitors the os-
cilloscope and, more specifically, the horizontal middle line that it displays (his
gaze, indeed, being fixed at that line). Second, his pointing gesture, as the sub-
sequent film stills suggest (1b, 1c, 1d), is not only directed at the oscilloscope
(Excerpt 1, 011–013, #1) but, more specifically, it also anticipates the change that
the oscilloscope is expected to indicate (the “downward jump” of the middle
line, due to the detected tunneling current). Third, that change, the anticipated
phenomenon, is produced on the oscilloscope, as the displayed line “jumps”
one unit below its initial position (1e). Pete’s negative assessment (as facially, 1f,
and onomatopoetically expressed, “pfffh::.”, Excerpt 1, 015–019, #2) may thus be
re-examined, too. That assessment, it should be emphasized, is proffered after
the relevant phenomenon has been produced and monitored (the “downward
jump,” 1e, which I had overlooked). The negative assessment, then, bears on
the sudden disappearance of the phenomenon, the displayed and detected tun-
neling signal, all covered up by an important sum of deviating signals, in one
word: noise (see 1f and #2, which are identical). Technically put, the negative
assessment expresses a disappointing “signal-to-noise ratio” (1e–1f), rather
than a “very noisy signal” (Excerpt 1, 014, #2). However, the very detection of a
tunneling current invites Pete to launch his experiment, despite its noisy back-
ground. In that, his [[automatic approach]] proves experimentally adequate,
making possible a first [local spectroscopy], even if the particular circumstances
of the approach’s technical execution remain suboptimal. In sum, readers should
now know why Pete envisaged his first experiment. Contrary to my own effort,
he controlled the tip position with the help of the STM regulation electronics
rack (see Excerpt 1, line 001, [A]‌), prior to launching the tip approach (Excerpt 1,
line 006) and monitoring it via the oscilloscope (Excerpt 1, lines 008–023, [C]).
This, notably, allowed him to avoid missing the single relevant phenomenon,
the anticipated “downward jump,” as displayed on the oscilloscope and indi-
cating tunneling current detection.
The [Local Spectroscopy] of PbMo6S8: A Second Tutorial

Problem in STM
Recall that the spectroscopy examined here involves subjecting the sample to a
range of bias voltages at a particular position above the sample surface, and re-
cording the resulting pattern of superconductivity. Before continuing to review
Pete’s work in the light of further re-enactments, a close look at Pete’s first at-
tempt at [local spectroscopy] of PbMo6S8 is in order:
(a)
Figure 12.3 Excerpt 2: First attempt at [local spectroscopy]

(b)
As the previously examined [[automatic approach]] of tip and sample, Pete’s

[local spectroscopy] discloses a three-part routine, which may be described as
follows. First, Pete establishes the relevant “field of view,” by opening the “spectro”
window of the STM computer interface (lines 028–030, #3) and introducing the
“area coordinates” (lines 032–033, 038–039). The latter operation defines the
area (a 10 × 10 nm square, 039) within which the spectroscopy is to be launched
and monitored; the former, the “spectro” window, affords Pete with the means
required for that double purpose (that is, the “Go” button for launching the spec-
troscopy, a view panel for monitoring its progressive achievement). Second, Pete
engages in action, by launching and monitoring the first spectroscopy (048–053,
#5), after having positioned the tip in the upper left corner above the sample sur-
face (with the help of the cursor and the perpendicular grid view of the sample
surface, 041–043, #4). Third, Pete evaluates the unfolding action; this time, si-
lently, by a series of facial expressions and corrective operations (from line 058
onward). The main operation consists in switching off the so-called topo filter
(062–063, #6). Yet, in the examined episode, this correction is judged insufficient
to obtain a satisfactory spectrum: Pete aborts the subsequent one, indeed (lines
078–079). Why is that?7
The local rationale for Pete’s technical stringency to abort the subsequent
spectrum may not be apparent, since he has just switched off the “topo filter.”
In fact, this question came into my mind only from the “standpoint of the
performer”(Sudnow 1978:xiii), as I noticed the question’s relevance when re-
enacting the procedure at hand. Consider the following vignette.
Vignette 2: Re-enacting the [Local Spectroscopy],

Its First Attempt
After having re-established the tunneling current, I try to redo Pete’s first at-
tempt at [local spectroscopy], while reading out the required actions: “opens
the window ‘spectro’ [ . . . ] moves to the entry ‘area coordinates’ [ . . . ].” It
takes ages! But as Pete assists and the transcript instructs me: “we will try to
put it anyway.” So I enter the area coordinates and, via a drag-and-drop move,
reposition the tip in the upper left corner of the “spectro” window. “Launches
a 1st spectroscopy—voilà, that’s it!” So I press the “Go” button. After two
seconds, a zigzag line moves in from left to right, not the intended spectrum.
Pete: “you see, it’s just noise.” Me: “so I need to switch off the filter.” Yet, as my
finger and camera search for it, I miss another “downward jump,” this time
in the “spectro” window, namely that of spectrum detection. A second later,
the STM indeed reproduces a new, unfiltered, well-shaped spectrum, so I ask
Pete why he would abort it. His blunt answer: “the mean of spectra is taken, so
I had to avoid taking the mean of junk [i.e., noise] and the good ones [i.e., the
projected series of superconductivity spectra].” Indeed, the upper right-hand
panel displays the “monstrous means” of the two successive measurements, as
Pete further explains.
My re-enacted procedure again affords us with a useful resource—a “look
again” procedure—to re-examine Pete’s first attempt at [local spectroscopy] and
its initial transcription (see Excerpt 2). That attempt, indeed, can now be expli-
cated for just how it was achieved, not simply by means of a correct technical
procedure (i.e., a first, single spectroscopy, correctly launched), but in view of its
experimentally adequate, disciplinarily oriented purpose (i.e., as a first in a se-
ries, a first reproducible spectroscopy). Pete’s technical stringency, to wit, finds its
procedural explication in this disciplinary orientation of his instrumental prac-
tice (whose manifest purpose escaped my initial transcription). Again, the serial
arrangement of film stills appears useful to expose that orientation and to revisit
the initial transcript (Excerpt 2).
Figure 12.4 The first [local spectroscopy] and its monitoring procedure
(Pete’s 1st attempt re-examined)
Pete, for a start, does not simply press the “Go” button (see Excerpt 2, 049), look
at the oscilloscope (051) and notice the disappearing “noise” (053, #5); rather,
he monitors, once again, the oscilloscope for the attempted entry into tunneling
regime, as eventually displayed (see the “downward jump” on the oscilloscope,
Figure 12.4, 2a). As the tunneling current has been re-established, recognizably
so, Pete lowers his gaze from the oscilloscope to the computer interface and the
upper central “spectro” window in particular (2b). The zigzag trace appearing in
the “spectro” window (2c), however, does not match the intended one (the m-
shaped superconductivity curve; see Appendix), a mismatch oriented to by Pete.
Indeed, Pete does not simply switch off the “topo filter” (062–063), but he aligns
that operation with its experimental purpose: the [local spectroscopy], probing
superconductivity. This alignment can be seen in the orientation of his gaze,
directed at the “spectro” window prior to the switch off (2d). The relevant change
in the “spectro” window, the “downward jump” of the spectroscopic trace, can
thus be monitored on time (see 12.4, 2e, which is identical to #6 in Excerpt 2).
The immediate abortion of the next spectrum, prior to its displayed completion
(2f and Excerpt 2, 078–079), affords us with a more determinate expression of the
attempted achievement: the experimental demonstration not simply of a first de-
tectable spectrum, but of the first reproducible one. The disciplinary orientation
of discovering work, by consequence, appears to encapsulate, from the outset, re-
producibility as an additional one of its internal requirements, rather than as the
external and isolated problem post hoc (e.g., in the form of an “experimenter’s re-
gress,” Collins 1985). The offered practice-based re-examination makes explicit
how the first [local spectroscopy], although technically correct, proved experi-
mentally inadequate and, by consequence, had to be aborted, where that abortion,
in turn, displayed Pete’s disciplinary orientation, aiming at “first time through
reproducibility” in particular (to adapt Garfinkel et al.’s 1981 expression). Task
re-enactment, in sum, afforded us with that second tutorial problem, explicating
Pete’s “technical stringency” in terms of its experimental relevance in situ.
The Successful [Local Spectroscopy] of PbMo6S8: A Third

Tutorial Problem in STM
The purpose of Pete’s experiment was to determine what kind of superconduc-

tivity characterizes PbMo6S8, “single-” or “multi-band.” To meet this purpose, not
only a first detectable but also a first reproducible spectrum would be required.
Yet, as the previous section made clear, he did not manage to produce this doubly
qualified spectrum at the initially selected position, the upper left corner of the
selected 10 × 10 nm square on the sample surface. For his second attempt at [local
spectroscopy], Pete would therefore change the measurement position, from the
upper left corner to the lower right one in the selected sample area (in tacit ac-
cordance with culturally prevalent reading rules, from left to right, top to bottom).
Incidentally, this displacement makes the initial position retrospectively appear
as selected in anticipation of possible failure. In turn, as he continues with the task
at hand, Excerpt 3 (Figure 12.5) gives us an initial idea of the successfully achieved
[local spectroscopy] of PbMo6S8. Let us take a close look at it.
(a)
Figure 12.5 Excerpt 3: Second attempt at [local spectroscopy]

(b)
Eventually successful, Pete’s second [local spectroscopy] entails a three-

part routine, too. First, he repositions the tip with the help of the cursor in the
established field of view, the sample grid view in the “spectro” window (see
Excerpt 3, lines 086–087). He accompanies the tip repositioning with an ono-
matopoeic formulation “shiu:::.” (088), thereby preempting any pending ques-
tion regarding the abortion of the prior attempt (Excerpt 2, 078–079). Second,
he launches and monitors the spectroscopy at the new position (Excerpt 3,
89 onward, #8), after having checked out tunneling current detection with
the oscilloscope (092–096). Finally, he exults: “YES!” (102). Note, inciden-
tally, that this positive assessment of the launched spectroscopy is produced
in the course of its monitored achievement (102–106, #9), prior to the actual
completion of the spectroscopic trace (107–108, #10). This early exultation by
Pete, expressed by his exclamation (“YES!”; 102), his clapping of hands (103)
and subsequent lifting of arms (104–105, #9), displays his disciplinary orien-
tation to the intended, then displayed experimental result—the “double gap”
spectroscopy of PbMo6S8, subsequently spelled out and positively confirmed
(127–133, #11).8
Again, we may ask the following kind of question: What were Pete’s local
grounds for his seemingly “early exultation,” prior to the technical completion
of the enacted procedure? Consider the following vignette in answer to this
question.
Vignette 3: Re-enacting the [Local Spectroscopy],

Its Second Attempt
“Now, shiu::: we will reposition the tip.” As I formulate this next action, I drag the
“tip” from the upper left corner in the “spectro” window to drop it in the lower
right one. After checking tunneling current detection, I relaunch the spectros-
copy at the new position by pressing “Go.” The result of that relaunch is shown in
the upper central “spectro” window. First, a zigzag line is traced once again, from
left to right. Second, the trace appearing in the “spectro” window a moment later
exhibits the first key property of a superconductivity spectrum, namely: a pos-
sible “gap,” displayed as a single gap, moving in from the left. A tenth of a second
later, the picture is completed. Indeed, the second key property of the intended
spectrum is displayed, namely: symmetry. That symmetry, although not perfect,
can be recognized as the spectrum comes to a halt, with its gap placed in the
middle of the “spectro” window. I immediately press the “print screen” button
to get the spectrum on the record. Yet my attempt fails to replicate Pete’s initial
experimental result. As Pete points out, “well, here you won’t get the double gap,
since we’re at 9 Tesla [i.e., not in the ground state].” Another single gap, rather
than a double gap, spectrum is reproduced, indeed.
Again, the demonstrative account of task re-enactment affords us with a “look
again” procedure to re-examine Pete’s achievement of the heuristic experiment,
his second trial at [local spectroscopy] leading to the empirical discovery of
multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8. On the basis of my practical expe-
rience and the practiced visual skill, film stills of Pete’s successful achievement
could be arranged as follows (see Figure 12.6), if only to have its initial transcrip-
tion re-examined (Excerpt 3).
From the outset, again, Pete’s achievement of the physical experiment, not
solely the technical procedure, can be made apparent. Indeed, he appears not
simply to press the “spectro” button (see Excerpt 3, 090) and gaze at the oscil-
loscope (Excerpt 3, 092). To the contrary, he manifestly uses the oscilloscope
to monitor the phenomenon it should display, namely: once again, the “down-
ward jump” of the current/time line, indicating the STM tip’s entry into the tun-
neling regime at the newly selected position (as pictured in Figure 12.6, 3a). As
the phenomenon has been produced and noticed, Pete’s attention shifts to the
upper central “spectro” window (3b and Excerpt 3, 100 onward). He then appears
to monitor the spectroscopy, as it is traced from left to right, for its physically
relevant properties. At first, a zigzag line appears—possibly the intended phe-
nomenon, possibly not (3b). The first property of physical relevance is then dis-
played: a potential “gap,” in fact the intended “double gap,” with the small one
Figure 12.6 The second [local spectroscopy] and its monitoring procedure
(Pete’s 2nd attempt re-examined)
lodged inside the big one (3c). The second key property, the symmetry of the
double gap, is displayed a tenth of a second later, as the gap can be anticipated to
come to a halt in the middle of the “spectro” window (3d). Taken together, those
two properties, double gap and symmetry of the double gap, appear as the locally
displayed properties, for a well-shaped spectrum of physical relevance to be pro-
duced and the experimentalist to exult: “YES!” (3d, and Excerpt 3, 102–106, #9).
His positive exclamation, indeed, is only produced as the launched spectrum
displays both properties, yet still in the course of its tracing (3d, 102). These
features, manifestly, are the local grounds for Pete’s “early exultation.” He then
claps his hands to mark the spectrum’s imminent completion (103–104) and, in
and upon its actual completion, lifts his arms in silence (104 onward, #10, which
is identical to 3e).9
Pete’s disciplinary orientation, with respect to the first reproducible spectrum
of good shape, appears in his timing of its recording, his pressing of the “print
screen” button (see Figure 12.6, 3f, and Excerpt 3, 115–117). He presses that
button (115) after the completion of the first spectrum (107, #10), yet only in
mid-course of the second one (110–119). Pete, in other words, doesn’t record
the first well-shaped spectrum immediately as I did (see Vignette 3). In fact,
he doesn’t record the first spectrum at all. Why? And: what does he record in-
stead? Readers may have guessed the answer: he records the first reproducible
spectrum, as and upon its well-shaped display in the upper right-hand panel of
the “spectro” window (3f, 115–117), rather than the first well-shaped spectrum
tout court, as displayed in the middle panel before (098–101, #9) and greeted
with instant celebration (102–106, #9). It is then the first detectable, reproduc-
ible, and well-shaped spectrum that is commented upon—“that, that’s the thesis”
(118), “you see, big gap, small gap, BIG” (126–133, #11)—and, since it has been
searched for long since, first found and distinctively qualified from within an
unprecedented physical inquiry at last, acknowledged as the “[truly special] mo-
ment when we discovered multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8 together”
(Petrović 2010:165) and eventually published as part of a “dramatic spectral var-
iation [ . . . ] [that] has not been previously observed” (Petrović et al. 2011:2).
This “double gap” spectrum of PbMo6S8, in other words, constitutes—or, at least,
constituted—the most reliable promise worldwide for “subsequent [spectra] [to]
systematically tease out an ordered set of relations retrospectively congruent
with the initial observation” (Bjelić and Lynch 1992:64)—that is, the empirical
discovery of multiband superconductivity in PbMo6S8.
Conclusion
In the late 1980s, Garfinkel and his colleagues asked what a physicist’s “discov-
ering work” would consist of, in its “discipline-specific work-site details as the
most ordinary organizational achievement of practical reasoning and practical
action in the world?” (Garfinkel et al.’s 1989:1, emphasis added). The description
offered in this chapter answered the pending question in terms of a hybrid study
of discovering work, thus closing the gap in the literature outlined in the intro-
duction. In so doing, the chapter afforded us with a perspicuous case to specify
discovering work as an “ordinary organizational achievement”—perhaps not the

most ordinary one “in the world,” but an “ordinary organizational” one none-
theless. In conclusion, I would first like to sum up this ordinary organizational
character of the achievement, experimentally protracted as it appeared to be,
and on this basis reflect upon the “discovery status” of the experimental finding
in physics—multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8—as a practitioners’ phe-
nomenon. Finally, the reflexive interest of technical self-instruction, as the
Garfinkelian research stance taken, will be spelled out for present and future
endeavors in ethnomethodological inquiry, and video analysis in particular.
The “ordinary organizational character” of the described course of discovering
work can be summed up in three respects. First, once the involved experimental
physicist, Pete, had prepared his STM facility, in the sense of envisaging the local
spectroscopy of PbMo6S8 as a feasible experiment, he would manifestly rely upon
that facility to run the intended experiment. This instrumental reliance may be
considered as an “ordinary organizational” fact, not only insofar as such reliance
may resemble practical attention, as structured in the ordinary use of everyday
objects, including scientific instruments (cf. Polanyi 1958:Chapter 4; Quéré
2006), but also in that such reliance appeared to be taught at the studied STM lab
as the appropriate attitude and monitoring procedure in STM experimentation
(cf. Sormani 2014: 25–101), in and through its “tutorial problems” (Garfinkel
2002c). Indeed, Pete used his STM facility as typically taught (including as taught
to the author), by relying upon and expecting the facility, if properly operated, to
measure in terms of the canonical formula of any tunneling experiment(s) that
the facility, his Aurora, was designed to enable, control, and display—that is, in
his case, in line with the equation dIt/dVt ∝ Ns, displayed as the m-shaped curve
characteristic of superconducting-materials-under-experimental-scrutiny.10
Although Pete relied upon his STM facility Aurora to achieve his PbMo6S8
spectroscopy, he did so neither blindly nor thoughtlessly. His manifest attentive-
ness toward the ongoing experimental achievement appears as a second aspect of
its “ordinary organizational” character. More specifically, the lived course of the
heuristic experiment—as attentively achieved by Pete—made evident that the
disclosed phenomenon (the “double gap” spectrum) was arrived at through his
sustained search (for “single-” or “multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8”)
and, for the first time (experimentally so), proved detectable (manifestly so), re-
producible (under hitherto most stringent conditions), and well-shaped (with
the “small gap” lodged inside the “big gap,” symmetrically so). To achieve the
physical experiment in just that way, then, meant to locally produce multi-band
superconductivity in PbMo6S8 as just that empirical discovery, where the local
production of its distinctive features (as a “long-sought” and, “for the first time,”
“detectable,” “reproducible,” “well-shaped” achievement) qualified it as such a
discovery in the considered domain of experimental physics (at least in terms

of the involved practitioner’s stance in the light of the Gestalt that he was about
to produce). Indeed, Pete conducted his experiment in just that way, devising
its technical procedures not simply to generate an experimental finding of any
kind, but to answer the physical question, still open, that these procedures were
devised to answer for a very first time, eventually culminating in the empirical
discovery of multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8 (as constituted by, and
qualified in terms of, the highlighted Gestalt features).
Third, what may be considered the most important aspect (inasmuch as it
conditions the two previously mentioned aspects) of discovering work as an “or-
dinary organizational achievement” should be emphasized—that is, the conduct
of such work from within, and as part of, a distinctive inquiry of disciplinary in-
terest, a particular inquiry of current physics at present. In this respect, it should
be noted that not only did this author, by and large, take for granted the achieved
equivalence between experimental adequacy (as spectroscopically displayed)
and disciplinary relevance (regarding “single-” or “multi-band superconduc-
tivity”) but, crucially, so did Pete as the involved experimentalist to start with.
If, upon having produced and found, for the first time and after a long search,
manifestly and reproducibly so, a well-shaped “double gap” spectrum in and of
PbMo6S8, Pete screamed “YES!,” clapped his hands, and threw his arms up in the
air, then this demonstrates how he is taking for granted the achieved equivalence
between displayed experimental result (the double “m” spectrum appearing on
his control screen) and its physically relevant “discovery status” (as for the first
time indicative of multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8, thus discovered
in the probed compound). In sum, the taking-for-granted of that equivalence
exhibits the key feature of the local production of the empirical discovery, as well
as its critical requirement, as an “ordinary organizational achievement” in the
examined domain of experimental physics (for a review of the domain published
after the presently described experiment, see Zehetmayer 2013).
“One has to do something new, to see something new” (Man muss etwas Neues
machen, um etwas Neues zu sehen). Lichtenberg’s aphorism has been quoted
in a philosophical reflection on discovering work in the natural sciences (cf.
Rheinberger 2007). At the STM lab, experimental physicists were always (at least
supposed to be) “doing something new” (cf. Sormani 2014). Sooner or later, they
were thus doomed to “see something new,” as described in this chapter. Empirical
discovery, in that sense, thus remains an ordinary feature of scientific practice to
be examined, if not re-enacted, rather than a conceptual fallacy to be criticized
or an anachronistic philosophy to be overcome (pace Latour 2004). Indeed, the
heuristic work of a discovering science could be recovered with a “video camera
in hand,” in and as its local production.
What might be the reflexive interest of technical self-instruction for present

and future endeavors in ethnomethodological inquiry, and video analysis in
particular? For one thing, this research stance questions any strong, principled
separation between the reflexive implication of the analyst (or video analyst)
in a studied practice and the practice’s reflexive accountability (e.g., Czyzewski
1994). Hence, perhaps, also Garfinkel and Wieder’s (1992:181) important ad-
monishment: “[ethnomethodological] findings are to be treated as corrigible
claims written as sketch accounts.” For another thing, the Garfinkelian research
stance, at least in my understanding, constitutes an invitation to demonstrate in
the present—in terms of tutorial practice, in empirical specifics, for each next
case anew—what ethnomethodological inquiry does amount to in situ, rather
than to reflect upon what it might or should have amounted to in an exegetical,
canonized, and yet hypothetical past ex cathedra (e.g., Hammersley 2016). In
particular, video analysis, once it is explicitly practice-based, affords one with
the possibility to explicate practice and expert practice, whenever and wherever
they have become “embodiedly transparent in [their] familiarity—[the] famil-
iarity of a skill” (Garfinkel 2002b:211). Finally, the self-instructive engagement
in situated practice, as an ethnomethodological commitment, immerses one
in the “doing of things” (Livingston 2008:258), not only in intricately technical
terms but also in unavoidably social ones, including the practical problem of
how to convince physicists to be able to use (if not abuse) their experimental
facilities, as well as the tricky task of writing up this very chapter as a legible (yet
not overly simplistic, nor unnecessarily technical) “sketch account” for a wider
audience on time.
Acknowledgments
Prior versions of this chapter have been presented at various workshops and
conferences, including the International Institute of Ethnomethodology and
Conversation Analysis (IIEMCA) in Fribourg, Switzerland, July 2011, and
the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in New York City,
August 10–13, 2013. I wish to thank attending participants for their remarks.
Special thanks are due to John Heritage and Doug Maynard, as well as Alex
Petrović, Michael Lynch, Wes Sharrock, and Rod Watson. A prior version
of the chapter has been published in Sormani (2014). I would like to thank
Routledge for its copyright permission. The finalization of the chapter
benefitted from and was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG, German Research Foundation)—Project-ID 262513311—SFB 1187.
Remaining mistakes are mine.
Appendix
Figure 12.7 Multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8 (print-screen,

spectroscopy #5)
In the left-hand window, the “double gap” signature of PbMo6S8 as a multi-band superconductor is
displayed (each arrow indicates a “gap,” “big” and “small”). In the right-hand window, the average of
progressive spectroscopies is displayed (after five spectra).
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13
Research with Numbers
Michael Mair, Wes W. Sharrock, and Christian Greiffenhagen
Introduction
In line with Garfinkel’s abiding way of working, in this chapter we explore his
re-specification of the problem of method in the social sciences both concep-
tually and empirically via an example of some practical features of research
with numbers. The example is drawn from a small-scale field study of a group
of social science researchers engaging in and with statistical analysis as part of
mixed-method research attempting to integrate qualitative and quantitative
work (see, e.g., Hesse-Biber 2015; Tashakkori and Teddlie 2010). Instead of fo-
cusing on what goes into gathering quantitative data (Maynard 2011; Maynard
and Schaeffer 2000) or on producing statistical analyses via model-building per
se (Greiffenhagen, Mair and Sharrock 2015; Greiffenhagen, Mair, and Sharrock
2012; Mair, Greiffenhagen, and Sharrock 2016), we focus on how statistical ana-
lyses are incorporated within research practice. Rather than look at what is vari-
ously involved in working up statistical analyses, in other words, we are going to
look at what is involved in organizing research around them—something which
will enable us to more clearly outline what we think an appreciation of Garfinkel’s
work can contribute to contemporary debates on knowledge making, as well as
numbering practices in the social sciences more broadly (e.g., Camic, Gross, and
Lamont 2014; Day, Lury, and Wakeford 2014; Lamont, Camic, and Gross 2011;
Mair, Greiffenhagen, and Sharrock 2013).
Quantitative research practices make for a particularly compelling, indeed
perspicuous, case study, as ethnomethodology, not known for its easy rela-
tionship with the social sciences in general, is often thought of as being par-
ticularly and markedly antagonistic to the project of quantification. This is
misplaced, however, and part of the reason why this misconception arises is
that ethnomethodology’s interest in problems of method in the social sciences
has been widely misunderstood. Garfinkel was no more presenting a critique of
quantification than he was presenting a critique of any aspect of social scientific
work (see also Heritage 1984:136, 167–68; Maynard and Schaeffer 2000). Rather,
he was pursuing a reorientation to social science as a practically organized en-
terprise and hence a reorientation to social scientific research—quantitative

Research with Numbers 349
and qualitative, calculative and interpretive—as practiced. Instead of presenting

a substitute for quantitative research practices or suggesting a way of doing
things better within them, Garfinkel’s work opens up space for studies that
examine what the local work of quantification, and indeed research methods
more generally, could consist in as a practical accomplishment (see also here
Maynard 2011). For Garfinkel, the question of interest, given that quantitative
work is undertaken routinely, was always, just how is it done? The claim that
formalizations, such as those that fill methods texts, offer useful answers to that
particular question was not something Garfinkel ever found convincing (Lynch
and Bogen 1997).
Our aim here is to recover aspects of Garfinkel’s work on method that were
obscured in the furor accompanying the release of Studies in Ethnomethodology
(hereafter Studies) in 1967. Although the reasons for ethnomethodology’s hos-
tile reception are now largely historical, the animus which drove critics’ attacks
having “biodegraded” (Derrida 1989) with the passing of time, the thrust of what
Garfinkel has had to say on the question of method has often been lost in its
wake. Interpreters treated Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology as a rival to the so-
cial sciences on the basis that it offered to overcome their collective deficiencies.
Garfinkel’s insistence that ethnomethodology was an “alternate” not an “alterna-
tive” or competitor to the social sciences, as he later put it (Garfinkel 2002), did
little to offset this.1
For various reasons, however, the situation in the social sciences is much
changed from the 1960s—both logical positivism and structural-functionalism,
for instance, are no longer the dominant forces they once were—and this is an
opportune moment to (re)introduce Garfinkel’s work on method for a new au-
dience. Following the appearance of empirical studies of laboratory work in the
natural sciences from the 1980s on (Lynch 1985, 1993), studies which took their
bearings initially from ethnomethodology and Garfinkel’s work in particular,
there is renewed interest in examining the methodic practices of the social sci-
ences as part of what Maynard and Schaeffer have called “a sociology of social
scientific knowledge” (Maynard and Schaeffer 2000; see also Maynard 2011).
Garfinkel’s work remains highly instructive here, particularly when it comes to
steering a course through the various methodological and conceptual hazards
that those undertaking empirical studies of work in the social sciences have to
negotiate.
Against that backdrop, in what follows we will do three related things. First,
we will offer a brief overview of the contemporary debate on problems of method
in the social sciences. Second, we shall outline what we see as the contribution
that Garfinkel’s work can make to those debates, with reference to continuities
in his writing from Studies (Garfinkel 1967) on. And, third, we shall present our
example, a case study in which problems of method were topicalized and made
available, practically and instructably, in the course of actually undertaking re-

search with numbers.
No Principled Resolutions: Contemporary Debates on

Method in the Social Sciences
The social science movement carries out its work, at its work sites,
with highest priority of attention to methods. Many of its methods
are deliberately designed. In the practical burdens of their use they
are carefully administered . . . [and those] careful methods are every-
where accompanied by incongruities.
—Garfinkel (2002:121–22)
Methods have long been a major preoccupation of social scientists, and Garfinkel’s
intense interest in the working practices of sociological inquiry interrogates the
practical grounds of that fixation and the troubles which fuel and sustain it. The
various troubles that Garfinkel comments on are not, however, ones that were,
prior to his noting them, unknown to professional social scientists. That there is
a problematic slippage and hence a mismatch between the actual and intended
objects of inquiry, i.e., between the phenomenon of investigation and the materials
collected to exhibit that phenomenon, is a common complaint. One of Garfinkel’s
most noted observations, for instance, concerns the distinction between the
ragbag of problematically opaque, situated, context-dependent expressions that
are the materials of social scientific research, and the methodologically preferred
practice of recasting them in forms regarded as suitable for scientific purposes
(and see here Hutchinson, Read, and Sharrock 2008). In Garfinkel’s (1967:6) own
words, this is the “promised distinction and substitutability of objective for index-
ical expressions.” As Garfinkel notes, this “remains programmatic in every partic-
ular case and in every actual occasion in which the distinction or substitutability
must be demonstrated” (Garfinkel 1967:6, emphasis in original). Garfinkel (1967)
mentions the “virtually unanimous agreement” among logicians and linguists on
the nature of indexical expressions and notes that:
[ . . . ] drawing upon their experience in the uses of sample surveys, and the
design and applications of practical actions, statistical analyses, mathematical
models, and computer simulations of social processes, professional sociologists
are able to document endlessly the ways in which the programmatic distinction
and substitutability is satisfied in, and depends upon, professional practices
of socially managed demonstration. . . . [Nonetheless] wherever studies of
practical action are involved, the distinction and substitution is always accom-
plished only for all practical purposes. (1967:6–7)
For Garfinkel (1967:6), the investment of “immense resources” in the ongoing

pursuit of “methods for . . . strong analysis” which would enable researchers, this
time finally, to move beyond statements of programmatic ambitions to their re-
alization was further indication, should it be needed, of the deep methodological
dissatisfactions that perpetually dog the social sciences.
Garfinkel thus took as his starting point the recognition among working
social scientists of the stubborn refusal of these methodological problems,
despite persistent and concerted efforts, to yield to their formal methodo-
logical advances. That “strong” analyses (Garfinkel 1967:6) remain elusive is
widely acknowledged. Indeed, social scientists have never needed anyone,
let alone ethnomethodologists, to tell them about problems with their discip-
lines’ methods; they have been continuingly attentive to them (see also Heritage
1984). The following from Turner and Kim (1999) gives an indication of how
disparaging sociologists can routinely be about the utility, effectiveness, and
prospects of the methodological state of the art:
[It] is hard to pretend that you have . . . the equivalent of a telescope, micro-
scope, linear accelerator, or the like when . . . [you] plod along handing out
questionnaires and conducting interviews . . . [T]‌o the extent that sociology
continues to produce verbal and written texts, devoid of instrumentation, the
discipline will continue to have problems in convincing skeptics that it has any
“hard data” or findings. (1999:10–11)
While Turner and Kim’s critique is perhaps more barbed than others2, the imme-
diate force of their account of problems of methods in the social sciences—that
they compare unfavorably to their counterparts in the natural sciences, that they
produce equivocal results, that they are irremediably textual, and so on—would
be conceded by the majority of social scientists. When the comparison is set out
in these terms, the social sciences do come out badly. Rather than assert other-
wise, the contemporary sociological approach has been to take a different tack
and argue that methods in the social sciences ought to be judged against different
standards from those that characterize the natural sciences (Osborne 2013). To
judge the social sciences in terms other than their own, as Turner and Kim do,
is thus positioned as unreasonable (Becker 2009). Taking the natural sciences
as the model to emulate, it is difficult to see how social science could amount
to anything more than a “clumsy imitation” (Gomez, Merino, and Tur 2010).
If using the natural sciences as a model for assessing social scientific inquiry is
unreasonable, however, the question then becomes, what might constitute more
reasonable terms of assessment?
There are two broad strands to recent thinking on this question, one exter-
nally facing and one internally facing. There is, first, the attempt to reappraise
what methods are, the role they play in the production of “social knowledge”
(Lamont et al. 2011) and the different standards at work in their evaluation. This
moves outward from specific research projects, disciplines, or even the social sci-
ences as a whole, and treats the problem of method as one variant of larger issues
affecting those seeking knowledge of society wherever and whenever they do so
(as in, e.g., Camic et al. 2014; Lamont et al. 2011; and see Mair et al. 2013 for
an overview). There is also, second, an attempt to develop justifications for the
ways in which research gets done despite all the recognized problems of method.
This kind of licensing activity is directed inward, toward other practicing social
scientists, and it is predicated on the claim that it is reasonable to proceed de-
spite both the global and local difficulties encountered as a matter of course by
those undertaking social scientific research. Taken together, the effect of both
arguments is to refocus discussion of methods on their relative strengths and
weaknesses and on their socially, culturally, and historically embedded and con-
tingent character.3 Instead of principled solutions, the emphasis is placed, at the
level of the local study, on “what works” and, at the level of disciplines, on of-
fering analyses of how what has been accepted as “what works” came to be ac-
cepted as such over time—i.e., in the emergence, consolidation, and diffusion of
different methods.
This body of work on the methodological bases of knowledge in and of so-
ciety redefines what can reasonably be expected from the social sciences. By
situating social science in wider fields of “social knowledge in the making,” we
are being asked to accept that it would not be reasonable to assess social science
methods using standards we would not apply to other forms of social knowledge
(Benzecry and Krause 2010; Camic et al. 2014; Lamont et al. 2011). By com-
paring and contrasting the relative merits of, for example, interviewing and eth-
nographic fieldwork using these pragmatic, pluralistic standards, we are being
asked to accept that it would not be reasonable to ask too much of either (or even
any) method—each has its strengths and weaknesses, each will generate unre-
solvable problems, and none will be suited for every task (Lamont and Swidler
2014). Nor will the question of which method might be most appropriate for any
given task be capable of being settled on a principled basis either—any decision
will itself be pragmatically oriented to considerations of circumstance, them-
selves subject to change.
When turned around, the argument is that it is perfectly legitimate to pro-
ceed despite and whatever the problems known to attend the use of any given
method because to let those problems curtail research would be unreasonable.
By suspending “divisive” (Lamont and Swidler 2014) demands for principled

resolutions, it is, however, perfectly possible to produce research which is good
in its own terms and for its time—acceptability to some audience thus displaces
the fulfillment of exceptional, universally accepted standards as sociology’s
feasible objective. The question of what would be good in completely general
terms is treated as an invidious distraction. Commenting on one recent “sec-
tarian” dispute in which ethnography had been said to be a “better” method than
interviews, Lamont and Swidler (2014) put the point as follows:
Our stance is that each technique has its own limitations and advantages and
that a technique does not have agency: all depends on what one does with it,
what it is used for. . . . We believe that debating techniques per se leads us down
an unproductive path. We are [thus] coming out against methodological trib-
alism. . . . (2014:154)
Both the internal/pragmatist and external/historicist strands of these positions

have been challenged. Hesse-Biber, to take one example, has recently argued
that the emphasis on “what works” can reify method and encourage narrow in-
strumentalism (Hesse-Biber 2015). Mauthner, to take another, has questioned
the claim that historical reconstructions of the emergence, consolidation, and
dissemination of methods as social knowledge-making practices do capture
those activities rather than merely project yet another (historically contingent)
reading onto them (Mauthner 2015). The issue, as Mauthner (2015:329) sees it,
is that work of this kind fails to address the “entanglements” of its own methods,
thereby taking the coherence of its own phenomenon, i.e., methods, for granted
in the process.
We have no interest in taking sides here, nor in encouraging a reconcili-
ation. We do, however, want to think about what else ethnomethodology—
as an “alternate” (Garfinkel 2002)—has to contribute to these debates. Like
Lamont and colleagues, ethnomethodology does not seek to make research
practices out as being “better or worse than they are usually cracked up to
be” (Garfinkel 1967:vii). Like Hesse-Biber and Mauthner, on the other hand,
ethnomethodology is oriented to talk of method as referencing, at best, the
motley assortments of heterogeneous, localized, and ad hoc forms of practical
action and reasoning in which actual research is grounded, rather than any
unified, stand-alone thing or domain of homogeneous, standardized practices.
What we see, therefore, in the sorts of analytical strategies social scientists
of all persuasions have adopted when invited to scrutinize their investiga-
tive practices (either to defend those practices or critique those defenses), is a
reworking of themes Garfinkel originally raised in the early 1960s and reiter-
ated across his career.
Nonetheless, ethnomethodology and the social sciences move in different

directions on these issues, despite points of convergence. Social scientists, as the
contemporary debates attest, are hyper-aware of problems with their methods.
However, the actual workings of in vivo methodological reasoning remain some-
what opaque and unexplicated in that work. Garfinkel’s writings and studies
allow us to revisit methodological issues in the social sciences, but in different
terms from those currently prominent. In the next section, we outline key
features of the account of method he offers. Subsequently, we provide an example
of methods as practiced, drawn from our own fieldwork. Garfinkel’s explication
of the grounds of reasonable method in social scientific work provides the bridge
across these three sections.
Garfinkel on Method: Reasonableness as a Feature of Practically

Adequate Solutions to Locally Encountered Problems
We are not suggesting that Garfinkel’s discussion of the methodological order

of sociology’s activities is void of critical content or intent, arguing, rather, that
there is nothing particularly ethnomethodological in a great deal of that crit-
ical assessment. It does not require a familiarity with ethnomethodology to ap-
preciate that the methodological practices of sociological researchers are often
problematic with respect to their own standards: that this is so is, in one form or
another, registered in the execution and reportage of the studies which embody
just those problems (see also Heritage 1984). The distinctive part that ethno-
methodology does play in Garfinkel’s treatment of method is innovative in one
particular respect: namely, in the manner in which it opens up the possibility of
making professional sociology’s research practices a topic of sociological inquiry
(cf. Zimmerman and Pollner 1970).
Other sociologists had made studies of sociological methods in use, but
Garfinkel’s originality was in making the study of sociology’s methodological
practices something to be done without concern for methodological correctives.
The work was not done to find out that methods were faulty, but was a natural
and unsurprising upshot of the thought that social science is a thoroughgoingly
practical matter and, from ethnomethodology’s point of view, can be studied in
just the same way as any other order of practical affairs (including ethnomethod-
ology itself). For Garfinkel, the methodological troubles of sociology are, from
the point of view of those who traffic in them, overwhelmingly normal, natural
troubles (Greiffenhagen, Mair and Sharrock 2015). Garfinkel’s contribution on
this front might be summarized as showing that the resolution of methodo-
logical troubles is subordinated to the practical management of research work,
that methodological problems are handled—Garfinkel’s term was “managed”
(1967:98)—for “all practical purposes,” dealt with in ways that prevent methodo-
logical failings from counting as invalidating weaknesses of actual inquiries. This
is effected through the operation of research practice via a combination of meth-
odological stringency and methodological reasonableness. In line with this, our
treatment of our empirical example is designed to bring out the ways and extent
to which methodological troubles, and the practical, ad hoc, solutions advanced
in relation to them, are treated as entirely reasonable matters, given the practical
circumstances in which professional sociological research is done.
However, Garfinkel’s stance on the social sciences is not easy to pin down. His
comments are not programmatic and unified, but fragmentary, dispersed, and
occasioned. Moreover, although he did explicitly and regularly disavow any crit-
ical motivation, he was far from consistent in that regard. Nonetheless, based
on a re-reading of Studies and a series of publications which appeared after its
publication (principally Garfinkel 1975, 2002; Garfinkel and Sacks 1970; Hill and
Stones-Crittenden 1968), we want to suggest that there are three recurrent lines
of analysis running through his engagement with method.
First, Garfinkel consistently came back to what he saw as an enduring as-
pect of social scientific practice: namely, its location within (and dependence on
knowledge of) the very societies and cultures which it sets out to analyze. For
Garfinkel, these were the practical conditions within which researchers were able
to make the social structures of everyday life accountable, i.e., observable and
reportable. Taking Garfinkel’s line, quantitative research, for example, involves
practical methods of social and cultural inquiry that assume the availability of
the features of the societies and cultures they set out to analyze. Sociologists’ ca-
pacity to find and make available social structures depends on their practical fa-
miliarity with them—they rely on that knowledge and rely on the fact that others
will rely on it, too, in assessing their work. They know that if they look, in other
words, they will find something to talk about and will be understood when they
do. It is for this reason that Garfinkel referred to them as “no-fail” enterprises
(1975:Seminar 2, line 1158)—the phenomenon of interest can’t escape their in-
vestigative inquiries because the phenomenon’s appearance is not reliant on their
formal methods.4
Second, Garfinkel’s work urges a reorientation to methods texts and methods
talk, not as reconstructed logics but as logics of reconstruction—i.e., ways of
making research available through disciplinarily-accepted accounting practices
that selectively rework and thus re-render whatever actually happened to be
done, which is typically treated as “specifically uninteresting” (Garfinkel 1967:7–9,
2002:107).5 Investigators use what the work could be said to amount to or show
to retrospectively (re)formulate what was done, and this in general terms rather
than in terms of specifics. Reconstructions are successful where they yield legiti-
mate and recognizable glosses for the specifics of what was done that speak to the
practical character of those inquiries in required field-relevant, social scientific

ways, i.e., only in as much and no more detail than may be reasonably asked for.
Third, and as a consequence, Garfinkel pointed to a divergence between, on
the one hand, the practical enterprise of research and, on the other, methods
accounts as a formalized aspect of a discipline’s writings. The problems social
scientists encounter with their unruly methods stem from the conflation of these
separate forms of practice—doing research and producing accounts of it. The
ethnomethodological insight is that formalizing methods represents a limited
solution to methodological problems because those problems are practical, not
formal in character. They occur in “common-sense situations of choice,” i.e., the
contexts and situations in which social scientists must make decisions about how
to actually go about their work (Garfinkel 1967:76–77, 94–103). In such situ-
ations, social scientists must continually devise solutions to problems that are
neither acknowledged nor acknowledgeable within official protocols or accounts
of research inquiry. As those practical considerations and their common-sense
solutions are left outside the scope of official accounts of methods, the “actual
order . . . remain[s]‌to be described” (Garfinkel 1967:24).
Garfinkel was well aware that his discussions regarding methods were not
news. Not only is adjusting to the practical circumstances of inquiry non-fatal,
it is a requirement of successfully completing work to a reasonable standard at
all. Relaying a conversation with Melinda Baccus, in his 1975 Boston seminars,
Garfinkel (1975:Seminar 2, line 1063) talked of a “not here, not now” require-
ment at work in social science research. Sociologists are “bright people” and, as
such, they are able to pinpoint theoretical, conceptual, and methodological fault
lines within their methods of working. However, they are also aware that were
they to prioritize those concerns, the work could not proceed. It’s not that those
matters couldn’t be questioned, but rather that the enterprise couldn’t continue
in its existing form if they were. It is in this sense that such questioning could
be characterized as unreasonable—attending to exactly how their own research
was getting done, how the closure of manifest methodological deficiencies was
achieved, would distract them from engaging in those activities. As Garfinkel
(1975:Seminar 2, lines 1077–78) put it: “Again, it’s not that [they’re] dumb, it’s
that [they’re] not interested, it’s not reasonable, it’s not a part of the practice.”
Working with Numbers
In the final substantive section of this chapter, we want to concretize the dis-
cussion with reference to a study that looked at how researchers go about doing
research, in our case research with numbers. Looking at what is involved in
working with numbers in a setting where numbers provided the interface
between the different strands of a collaborative research project, we focus on the

ways that ties are made between numbers and the world, and then examine the
management of the practical exigencies of doing research by the numbers.
Introduction: An Interface Problem
Day, Lury, and Wakeford (2014:124) have recently discussed what we gain
when we reorient to what they call “numbering” as “a practised or cultural ac-
tivity.” Such an approach would not begin with “those formulae, accounts, or
practices in which numbers feature as (always already situated) integers or se-
miotic entities, but by addressing the ways in which numbering is composed or
accomplished as a form of practice” (Day et al. 2014:128). For Garfinkel and for
ethnomethodology more broadly, the challenge here is that of grasping the con-
stitutive features of different ways of working with numbers. The example we
work through in this section is an attempt to do just that in one particular case.
Social scientific inquiry is not undertaken in a vacuum—it presupposes and
references wider disciplinary surrounds, operating in dialogue (friendly or crit-
ical) with, and taking its lead from, what are regarded as significant past studies,
canonical texts, exemplary theoretical and methodological frameworks, and ex-
isting bodies of (more or less) secure empirical data and findings (Fish 2000:767;
Kuhn [1962] 2012:181–86; Wittgenstein 1956:Part VII:47, 413). In the majority
of cases, these connections are indirect and loose—on precisely whose shoulders
anyone might be standing can be endlessly revisited, particularly when it comes
to what are regarded as “the classics” (Osborne and Rose 1999:369). In a sizable
minority of cases, however, the connections are much more direct: these are
cases, and our example is one such, where a particular study serves as the imme-
diate point of departure for another.
The example is drawn from a field study we conducted of work on a collabora-
tive project involving qualitative and quantitative researchers with backgrounds
in various social science disciplines who had come together to undertake a meth-
odologically focused study designed to show the payoffs of mixing methods. The
study took the data sets generated by a much bigger national-level longitudinal
study (which one of the principal investigators had access to) as its starting point.
The plan was to conduct an analysis of a subset of the statistical data from this
large-scale study, focusing on social relationship variables indexing type, fre-
quency, and intensity of social contacts between different kinds of people, such
as family, friends, neighbors, and so on, that would be undertaken in conjunction
with qualitative field research with 25–30 of the study participants on a range
of related topics. The aim was to see how quantitative and qualitative methods
could be used in tandem to inform one another, and whether new insights into
the statistical measures could be generated through more detailed exploration of

the responses of a subset of those who had been initially surveyed.
One possibility aired—the “prize to be won,” as Garfinkel (2002:103) might
have put it—was that the research, if successful, might even lead to changes in
what and how questions were asked during the national-level survey. The substan-
tive hinge upon which this contribution would turn was the analysis of the rela-
tionship between the demographic category of generation and the ways in which
people conceived their relations with others as they grew older. They were to be
asked about these issues directly, but they were also to be raised by, for instance,
investigating what respondents saw as the “peopled” character of places and their
association with members of particular generations, e.g., city centers and young
people (see also here Rughiniș and Humă 2015 for an analysis; drawing on Sacks
1972 for the inference-rich character of demographic variables).
A project of this kind required a research team with different areas of recog-
nized expertise. Although investigators were doing different kinds of research
together, they were clearly separated from one another in a negotiated but none-
theless unyielding division of technical labor: for the most part, quantitative
researchers on one side and qualitative researchers on the other, each side tasked
with bringing something different to the research. When working out this divi-
sion of labor, the question of how the study was to be conducted turned out to be
problematic in a way that could not be resolved once and for all (e.g., by figuring
out before the research was undertaken who was going to do what). The practical
integration of the qualitative and quantitative components of the project had to
be explicitly addressed as an issue in its own right and on an ongoing basis. Put
most simply, the researchers had to deal with an interface problem: How would
they connect their activities as they proceeded?
In addressing this interface problem, the researchers had, first and foremost,
to make themselves clear to each other. And, because they could not assume
the other researchers had any deep familiarity with their established ways of
working, this became an instructional—“perspicuous” (Garfinkel 2002:181)—
setting in which questions of method—especially, given their centrality and
complexity, quantitative methods—were explicitly topicalized, i.e., re-specified
in terms of the practicalities of getting the study done in the time available and
in light of constraints of staffing, resources, and knowledge. As we will show, the
numbers were a recurrent focus in this.
Numbers, Interpretation, and the World
The original intention was that the study would adopt what is termed a “se-
quential” mixed-method design (Hesse-Biber 2015). As one of the researchers
put it: “we started off with different scenarios as to what we would do—one
of them was that the quantitative data would offer us some puzzles that we
would investigate qualitatively; the other was that we would use the quanti-
tative findings to sample people” (interview). The initial idea was that a first
phase of quantitative analysis would lead into a first phase of qualitative re-
search by supplying, among other things, a sampling frame. The quantitative
research would thus inform (but not direct) the qualitative research, which in
turn would feed back into the quantitative research, in an iterative and dialog-
ical process (the capitalization in this notation indicates the equal weighting
given to both aspects of the research, where lowercase would indicate a lesser
weighting for one or the other, and the arrows represent timing): QUAN →
QUAL (→ QUAN → QUAL . . .).
The quantitative aspect thus had logical precedence, a form of “conditional
complementarity” (Maynard and Schaeffer 2000:332), with the rest of the re-
search following on from it. However, given the complexity of the data, the
quantitative analysis turned out to be more difficult and to take longer than
had first been imagined. Indeed, the complexities were such that they went
analytically beyond the expertise of the quantitative researchers, necessitating
a turn to a statistician for support (and see Mair et al. 2016 for a discussion
of the relationship between quantitative domain experts, as they are called,
and statisticians). The research thus acquired an additional and initially un-
foreseen element: (STAT & QUAN) → QUAL. Together they began isolating
and recasting elements within the larger data set, creating a smaller data set
that linked 12 socio-demographic variables (i.e., age, marital status, ethnicity,
education, health, place of residence, neighborhood characteristics, and so
on) with 4 categories of social relationship (i.e., those with spouses, children,
other family, friends and neighbors), each with 4 dimensions (i.e., close-
ness, quality, frequency, and “mode,” e.g., face-to-face contact, phone calls,
texts, letters, etc.). Once this initial preparatory work was done, they then
analyzed the statistical relationships between the resulting 48 variables (12
initial variables multiplied by the 4 categories of social relationship). Based
on that analysis, they created a range of composite variables, or factors, that
captured different patterns of variation in participants’ social relationships
linked to their socio- demographic characteristics and assigned them
different scores.
The final step was to find ways of differentiating the population they were
focusing on in terms of these factors. This procedure is known as a cluster anal-
ysis because it identifies clusters of individuals with broadly equivalent factor
scores within the target population. Factor scores were thus here a way of pro-
ducing profiles of groups of respondents by weighting and quantifying similar-
ities in the answers they provided to particular items in the underlying survey,
namely, the relationship variables they wanted to foreground. As much art

as formal procedure, there was no clear-cut way of determining the optimal
number of clusters to use to “partition” those they were interested in. Different
algorithms and different ways of interpreting those results produce different
numbers and different types of clusters. In this case, one of the questions that
emerged was whether four, five, or six clusters worked best given the project’s
purposes. The quantitative researchers eventually decided upon five clusters
or types of people, defined by dimensions of their social networks. At one log-
ical extreme, this might be thought of as picking out, for instance, people who
were very well connected in all survey-measurable ways and, at the other, those
who were completely isolated, with various types of people in between, such as
those with more or less close ties to family but not to their neighbors/neigh-
borhood and vice versa.
Whether four, five, or six clusters exhibited the best fit with the data was
not itself a mathematical or statistical question, since it involved the choice
between different (mathematical) ways of clustering as well as a considera-
tion of whether the eventual result would make sense—these mathematical
relationships were, after all, meant to speak of and to the social world in a
meaningful way. As quantitative researchers are well aware, the fit between
data, analysis, and clusters is an achieved fit and, while it involves work with
numbers, that achievement does not rest on quantitative considerations
alone. Interpretation of the results is not solely about the mathematics (which
the statistician has helpfully formalized on the researcher’s behalf). Rather,
it involves working out what the numbers point to, given what is known al-
ready (and non-mathematically) about the world. This is one way, as stated
earlier, that social scientists rely on common-sense knowledge of social struc-
ture. Thus, without any need to look further and at a glance, it is possible to
spot anomalies and artifacts, e.g., children who are older than their parents.
It is also possible to identify any accidental, spurious, or bogus typological
predicates and associations the analysis might have thrown up, e.g., the cat-
egory of men-who-stay-with-their-mother-when-visiting-old-friends-who-
like-to-gamble (Goodman 1955). Both the artifactual and the spurious can
be safely ruled out without any mathematical backing—here the usability of
a cluster could be rejected despite being mathematically acceptable. The mis-
match of concern is with the social world as known in common, not with the
numbers. This is less about numbers as cultural artifacts (Mair et al. 2016) and
more about the reasonable ways in which research with numbers proceeds,
i.e., by looking for the reasonable account of what the statistical analysis has
revealed. Common-sense forms of reasoning about social structure thus pro-
vide the grounding that assures the numbers of their meaning.6
The Priority of Practical Exigencies: Research by the Numbers
The cluster analysis and the derivation of types were not purely intellec-
tual exercises. In the context of the wider study, this approach was functional;
others were waiting on the results. The cluster analysis had been meant to pro-
vide a principled sampling strategy for selecting respondents for the qualitative
interviews. However, given the time it took and the limited “window” available
for conducting the qualitative interviews,7 the first round of interviewing had to
proceed before the cluster analysis was complete. Working without the numbers,
the qualitative researchers had to devise a way of deciding whom to contact for
interviews so as to get the field research underway. Reflecting on the process as
a whole, one researcher put the difficulties as follows: “a lot of people have tried
this, but actually, for logistical and research reasons, it’s quite difficult to do both
within one project; because they both need their own timescale. . . . We started
off with different scenarios . . . [but the analysis] on the quantitative data, that
took a long time; and meanwhile we couldn’t just wait for that to finish; we basi-
cally had to start sampling for the qualitative research” (interview).
Doing a proper job on the statistics was thus understood to need the extra
investment of time, but that meant the interviewing had to be done so as to get
things underway, despite a research design in which the interviewing was to
follow the quantitative analysis.
As the qualitative research had to begin while the quantitative analysis was
still being conducted, this meant formulating an alternative rationale for sam-
pling that remained consistent with the broad goals of the project. More spe-
cifically, they sought to anticipate what the numbers might say so that the two
aspects of the project would remain at least potentially compatible later. In the
course of their deliberations on this thorny question, they settled on selecting
whom to contact by the types of place in which those people lived. So what had
been designed as a sequential study turned into a parallel study, at least in the
first wave: STAT & QUAN | QUAL not QUAN → QUAL.
Our study took place at a time when the team were preparing for a second
wave of qualitative fieldwork, when further decisions had to be made on whom to
contact next and on what basis. The quantitative analysis was (largely) complete
so the interface problem was posed anew: How were they going to combine what
emerged from that analysis, with its emphasis on formally determined clusters of
participants, and the emphasis on place for selection purposes? How was this to
be done by the numbers? A series of meetings were held in which various sam-
pling strategies and options were discussed by members of the team. We focus
on two meetings, the first involving the qualitative researchers—“A” and “B”—
alone, and the second involving the whole team, including the individual, “C,”
leading the quantitative research. The main concern in both meetings was on
agreeing to a rationale for the selection of areas where they would contact indi-
viduals to interview. We start with the earlier of the two; transcriptions reflect
standard orthography. In Extract 1, “C” is the lead quantitative researcher who
was not present:
Extract 1: First Meeting I
A:
We were thinking, and C agrees with this doesn’t he, but
[even though it’s now complete] we only take the cluster
analysis so far in the sampling. So it’s not something we
would want to drive our sampling. We’re interested to see
how the clusters fall within the areas that we’re going
to take.
B: I’ve chosen areas that I think are interesting.
A: But for other reasons, yeah?
B: Yeah.
Extract 2: First Meeting II
A:
But I suppose what I’m saying here is that when we’re
looking at the clusters then we’re thinking about sam-
pling on the basis of people. And I’m really keen that we
keep that edge which is sampling on the basis of place be-
cause we’re interested in place.
B: I am trying to cross them. So I’m choosing areas that I think
are different and interesting in their own ways. Originally
we were talking about place, doing the first batch around
place, with the second batch more cluster driven. I was at
least trying to make this second batch do both.
A: Yeah, well I know we agreed that we’d look at those, doing
both is a good idea isn’t it.
Extract 3: First Meeting III
A:
So we feel comfortable that we’re sampling on the basis
partly of clusters, partly on the demographics of place
but partly on the physical environment. The other thing
I’m thinking is pragmatics: area x is interesting and

it’s also closer to me.
As we can see, a number of considerations were involved in deciding the sam-

pling procedure for the second wave of qualitative interviews: (a) sampling based
on “place” (Extract 2), which informed the first wave of interviews and was a
prominent focus of the overall qualitative research project; (b) sampling based on
the clusters emerging from the quantitative research, which was important given
the aim of combining—in some way—the results of the quantitative and qualita-
tive research (Extracts 1, 2, and 3); and (c) sampling according to practical consid-
erations, in particular, proximity to the researchers who would actually conduct
the interviews (Extract 3). The qualitative researchers were thus trying to come
up with a rationale for the sampling for the second wave of interviews which, in a
sense, aimed to “satisfice” (as Herbert Simon once termed it) these different con-
siderations, i.e., “do both” (Extract 2). In Extract 1, one of the researchers, having
referred to C, indicates that any of these considerations, including the cluster
analysis, can be taken “only [ . . . ] so far in the sampling.” In other words, there
is an acknowledgment that these different considerations have to be taken into
account, but that none of these considerations can be the only ones taken into ac-
count. The researchers’ strategy here is not, therefore, an in-principle solution but
a flexible, open-ended one. Moreover, it can be flexible and open-ended because
the researchers already know what they are interested in finding and so can steer
what they do toward finding it (knowing that they will).
The question of which areas to select participants from was taken up again
in the second full-team meeting a week later, a meeting that also involved C,
who was finalizing the quantitative analysis. In that meeting, the qualitative
researchers set out their sampling rationale for C, making sure, in the process,
that their solution involved “enough” of the cluster analysis for the purposes of
sampling.
Extract 4: Second Meeting I
A:
So you’ve suggested some areas, C, and we talked about
these because we were thinking about having a continued
interest in place, different types of places, but also
different types of socioeconomic characteristics amongst
the sample.
C: Mm.
A:
And also a range of cluster membership, which we’ll try
to cover.
B: Yeah.
C:
So the areas you’ve highlighted are they on the basis of
all of those things? They’re place and . . . clusters?
B: They’re a combination of place and cluster.
Extract 5: Second Meeting II
A: C, have you got any particular thoughts?

C:
I guess I was interested of course in making sure we had
a good range of clusters, which I think we do, to choose
from. [Lines omitted]
B: Well they’re all basically chosen on a mixture of things.
I mean [in terms of area selection] it’s partly on the
cluster, that they have a reasonable spread of clusters
(pause) either because they have some kind of demographic
change or they’re very stable. And also that they have a
mix, either a mix of one or another kind of economic pro-
file as well.
Extract 6: Second Meeting III
C: Area y is very interesting because it’s fives and twos.8

B: It’s also chosen because it’s on the edge of an area with
a large Indian population, it’s an interesting area
anyway.
Extract 7: Second Meeting IV
C:
But do we want to randomly, semi-
randomly, pick some
cluster fives . . . and some cluster twos?
A: That might be a good idea actually.
C:
Just so . . . depending on who agrees and doesn’t agree,
we have some additional [interviewees].
A: So we’d know they were at the end of the list.
C:
Yeah, so if we don’t get enough fives and twos, we could
add them in. Maybe do more than thirty, maybe just get an-
other three twos and another three fives.
B: Just randomly.
C:
Semi-
randomly, so areas we can get to and areas that in
some sense connect with the areas we’ve already chosen.
In Extract 4, the qualitative researchers make clear to the quantitative re-

searcher, C, that there was not one criterion that they were looking at when de-
ciding on the sampling, but a variety, in particular “place and cluster.” C notes that,
obviously, their main concern is whether the evolving sampling procedure is in-
teresting “from a cluster perspective”—and points to an area which includes only
people from one cluster (Extract 5) and another area which only includes people
from two clusters as particularly useful in that regard (Extract 6). Here, the orien-
tation to place brings both a capacity to focus on people within specific clusters
exclusively, as well as to access people across a mixture of them at once, while
ensuring back-up respondents in case of contingencies such as non-response. In
Extract 7, a fourth explicit criterion of sampling is introduced, one that is very im-
portant for quantitative research: randomness. So: can we introduce randomness,
or semi-randomness, while satisfying considerations (a), (b), and (c)?
These exchanges highlight a number of things. First, we see that the researchers
are engaged in tutorial work. The more qualitatively oriented researchers are in-
volved in setting out how the quantitative sampling rationale (the interest in
clusters) can be mapped to the qualitative rationale (the interest in place), which
in turn the more quantitatively oriented researcher then maps back to the cluster
analysis. This involves talking through the proposed solution to the sampling
problem out loud in order to work out what it means in terms consistent with
the anticipated next stage of the project, specifically as to what and how decisions
will be made around selection. At the same time, they are attempting to antici-
pate and so find ways of ensuring that different interests are made compatible via
those decisions, the aim being to devise a strategy in which multiple selection
criteria can be satisfied in a way that is consistent with each taken separately.
Common ground must be and is found, with C, initially seemingly slightly skep-
tical on first hearing, eventually embracing and elaborating B’s compromise po-
sition. That common ground involves a relaxation of restrictions on what was
initially to count as relevant. This finds no better expression than in the notion of
“an interesting area anyway,” i.e., an area of interest from a qualitative and quan-
titative perspective and, in various un(der)determined ways, in other senses, too.
Nonetheless, while separate interests were accommodated in this way, those
interests were not fully interchangeable. The selection of sampling areas was
consistent with each side’s criteria, but both sides were not interested in the same
way. Where the concerns of the researchers did directly align, this centered on
their common status as researchers, rather than on their operational roles as
researchers of different kinds. For instance, the researchers were unified by the
practical demands of the research: all involved had an interest in (a) making sure
the process ran as smoothly for them as possible, and in (b) ensuring that it ran
smoothly for others, too, even if on a different side of the project’s division of
labor. That an “interesting area” was to be identified, for instance, in terms of
whether they could get there by means of the transport available to them (i.e.,
car or bus, depending on who was doing the interviewing) is crucial. If the statis-
tical analysis told them to go somewhere they could not readily get to, what the
analysis was pointing to had to be adjusted. The soundness of the decisions they
made around area selection remained an open question, one that could only be
answered by seeing what the results turned out to be. No external standard was
in place by which they could judge this prior to actually doing the work and man-
aging unforeseen troubles along the way. As a consequence, the research had a
“wait and see” proviso (cf. Garfinkel 1967:3, 40–41) appended from the start, and
developed in response to ad hoc considerations throughout.
Here, in pursuing the practical task of getting “this thing put together and
into the streets by Friday” (Garfinkel 1975:Seminar 2, lines 1066–67), that is, in
getting the research work done, their capacity to move forward was thus secured
by the notion of “an interesting area anyway” as a practical methodological de-
vice. Its workings were not explicated but remained intrinsically vague: they
were indexical, situation-dependent. Indeed, the utility of the “interesting area”
gloss, its usability, was a function of its vagueness. Had it been rendered more
specific, its capacity to do the stitching work it was formulated to do at a project
level might have been called into question. As Garfinkel (1975:Seminar 1, lines
527–36) once noted about actual methods in the social sciences: “[The social sci-
ences] are simply loaded to overflowing with . . . natural language-dependent
devices. . . . They have one very gorgeous property. They’ll do any goddamn pro-
ject you want to make them do. They just do.”
Our study highlights the perennial tension and simultaneous complemen-
tarity between collecting data for a specific objective in a particular way and
seeing what you have collected and what you can make of it. Garfinkel’s point
was that this tension cannot be resolved; rather, it has to be managed. What is
more, in managing it, the research itself is changed, although far from fatally.
In our case, by exploiting ambiguities and vagueness in the sampling catego-
ries being worked with, the relevance of the numbers to the exercise alters. The
project began as an attempt to improve data collection by trying to connect the
data collected to the variables being used to analyze that data statistically, and
selecting interview participants by drawing them from the relevant cluster. But
this procedure was loosened in the face of practical difficulties. Sample selec-
tion was ultimately determined on the basis of general themes rather than a
“strong analysis.” Far from being problematic, and consistent with Garfinkel’s
central point, this strategy represented not just a problem overcome, but a vic-
tory for the project.
Conclusion
We’re talking here about the most practical work in the world.
—Garfinkel (1975:Seminar 1, line 614)
In this chapter we set out, following Garfinkel, to explicate and elaborate what is
involved in actually doing research with numbers. As we have tried to show, and
as Garfinkel puts it in the preceding quotation, it is practical work through and
through. The situation of inquiry that our example details is not aberrant, anom-
alous, or unusual: it is run-of-the-mill, and represents what, in their research,
social scientists are doing—it is the practice. As the example shows, it is not that
working social scientists, unlike ethnomethodologists, are unaware of these is-
sues, nor of their largely unresolved condition, nor is there any such suggestion
in Garfinkel’s meditations on the methods in use in professional sociological
inquiries. That we learn of these issues from social scientists should underline the
trouble with that claim (see also Maynard and Schaeffer 2000:335).
Garfinkel’s (1967 and elsewhere) comments on method are best understood
descriptively as offering the view that professional social scientists understand
their work as pervaded by methodological troubles, but these are lived with,
and handled, as occasions demand, rather than being systematically resolved.
Furthermore, that any study will depart in all manner of ways from textbook
methodological stringencies does not prevent its subsequent circulation as a fac-
tual report. As our example illustrates, the fact that pervasive methodological
troubles are provided with solutions adequate for “all practical purposes” rather
than in terms of strict compliance with rules of “method” reflects the extent to
which the problematic implementation of methodological policies comprises
the most widespread of “normal, natural troubles” (e.g., Garfinkel 1967:187–91)
within these disciplines. As a result, the way in which the management of the
operationalization of method is encountered is as the most matter-of-course as-
pect of the research task at hand.
We are pointing to instances that participating colleagues would acknowl-
edge as “good work” involving, in the example we have been looking at, the
articulation of data collection and analysis tasks with the management of organi-
zational constraints on the coordination of concerted research activity. Handling
problems, such as how can time lost here be made up there, and if so with what
implications for initially projected outcomes, means abiding by reasonable
standards, good enough for all practical purposes. Such accommodations are
ubiquitous and they are also eminently reasonable. What Garfinkel sought to
make visible as a topic, and what we have sought to highlight in our example, are
serious efforts at doing the work the research demands in the light of ever-arising
and ever-unforeseen complications. That effort is invested not in circumventing
those demands, but in finding a best solution where doing what was supposed to
be done, in a strict sense, is all but impossible. That work typically goes unseen
or, at least, unspoken. Garfinkel’s lasting contribution has been to redirect our at-
tention to that work as the praxiological foundation of social scientific research,
whether with numbers or without.
Acknowledgments
This research was made possible by the UK Economic and Social Research
Council through funding to the National Centre for Research Methods, project
code RES-576-25-0022. We would like to thank the researchers we studied for
their time, patience, and generosity in facilitating our study.
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14
The Sherlock Experiment
Eric Livingston and John Heritage
Psychological research on reasoning has, for many years, been dominated by

small-scale experimental studies, building on and continuing a tradition of
experiments like those of Johnson-Laird and Wason (1970), Griggs and Cox
(1982), Evans et al. (1983), and Tversky and Kahneman (1980, 1982a, 1982b).
Manktelow (2012) provides an overview of the experiments and the theorizing
associated with them.
These studies share a number of features. As illustrated in Figure 14.1, the
experiments consist of mathematical “word problems”—logical or mathemat-
ical problems expressed, for example, in terms of hands of cards, underage
drinking, car accidents, or the swimming abilities of deep-sea divers.1 Second,
students taking the experiments are treated as “black boxes”: they are given
problems and they return answers to them. Although the aim of the experiments
is to understand the unseen cognitive processes that produce the experimental
results (Evans 1993:566), explanations are typically sought for why experimental
subjects, more often than not, give incorrect answers. And, lastly, the studies
focus on the cognitive processes of individuals, not on the ways reasoning might
be cultivated and sustained by a group of people reasoning together.
In contrast to these individualized psychological studies, we were interested
in the collaborative production of mutually recognized, accountable reasoning.
We wanted to create an experimental situation where we could directly observe
Only one of the following premises is true about a

particular hand of cards:
If there is a king in the hand, then there is an ace.

If there is a queen in the hand, then there is an ace.
If there is a jack in the hand, then there is a ten .
Is it possible that there is an ace in the hand?
Figure 14.1 One of a Battery of Experimental Questions from Goldvarg and

Johnson-Laird (2000)

members of an experimental group working and reasoning together, allowing us

to see how they developed and assessed the adequacy of their reasoning with and
for each other. Therein lay the origins of the “Sherlock Experiment.” The plan was
to give a group of four students a crime problem, force the students to talk with
each other by limiting their visual access to individual sets of written clues, and
then watch how they went about trying to find a solution to the crime.
The Experiment
The Sherlock Experiment was based on the board game 221B Baker Street,
produced by John N. Hansen Co., Inc. The following text, adapted with minor
changes from Case #22, “The Adventure of the Pillaged Pawnbroker,” was given
to each of the members of the experimental group—“Ava,” “Bea,” “Chuck,” and
“Debbie,” all (pseudonymized) undergraduate students. It was then read out
loud to the group as a whole.
Early this morning, Miles Balfour, the proprietor of the

Pawnshop, was found stabbed to death behind the main counter
of his establishment.
The lock on the Pawnshop’s front door had been broken and
$34.16 had been taken from the cash register.
A careful inventory by the police revealed that the bizarre

thief had taken the following items: yesterday’s newspaper,
a porcelain flower vase, a ball of string, and a helmet which
was unbolted from a complete set of Old English armor.
Mrs. Claire Balfour, who discovered her husband’s body, is

at a loss to shed further light on the tragedy. She recalls
that her husband, who had recently purchased the shop from
Alistair Krebs, had only bitter words for his unprofitable
investment.
Indeed, Mrs. Balfour could remember only three customers

during the entire week: newspaper reporter Henry Kirk, who
paid in cash to redeem some books, Mrs. Phyllis Cahill, who
cleaned out her husband John’s attic, and Playhouse manager
Wilbur Partridge, who pawned a dusty prop box for which he
couldn’t find a key.
The Sherlock Experiment 373
The police theorize that Balfour happened to surprise a

thief during the night. They have arrested Paulie “The Pick”
Chandler, a petty crook who was seen in the area.
In the Baker Street game, players take turns rolling a die and moving their tokens
to various locations on the game board—the Museum, the Boar’s Head Inn, and
the Tobacconist, to name three. Upon reaching such a location, if another player
hasn’t temporarily “locked” the location, a player is allowed to read the clue associ-
ated with that site and to make written notes. Various strategies and tactics can come
into play, with the players competing to gather information and solve the crime.
In our experiment, the aim wasn’t to hide information from the subjects, to make
them search for clues, or to have them compete with each other. We wanted them
to talk together and to work toward a common, mutually recognized solution of
the crime. Our procedure, after we read the account of the murder, was to give each
of the subjects his or her own set of individual clues. We encouraged the subjects
to read their clues to each other as many times as they wanted or found neces-
sary. The subjects were not, however, allowed to share the pieces of paper on which
their individual clues were written or to make written notes on their deliberations.
We wanted to deter them from turning the crime problem into a pencil-and-paper
logical puzzle which they tried to solve individually on their own.
The four sets of clues, based on those from 221B Baker Street but modi
fied, expanded, and fitted to the experimental situation, were as follows
(Boxes 14.1–14.4).
Box 14.1 Clue Set 1
1. The helmet is quite large.

2. Why is it likely that the police have arrested the wrong person?
3. The missing flower vase was one of the items Phyllis Cahill sold from her
husband’s attic.
Box 14.2 Clue Set 2
4. The killer didn’t bring the murder weapon to scene of the crime.
5. A valuable art object form the 15th century was stolen recently from the
Cultural and Natural History Museum.
6. Henry Kirk’s hobby is collecting old coins and medals.
Box 14.3 Clue Set 3
7. A Knight’s broadsword was part of the set of Old English armor.

8. A parcel might be tied together with string.
9. What items weren’t stolen?
Box 14.4 Clue Set 4
10. The murder weapon was too unwieldy and heavy for most women and
many men to use.
11. The police have no clues or suspects in the museum robbery.
12. Why was the cash register emptied?
The experimental session lasted one hour within which the subjects were
asked, collectively, to identify in writing the killer, the murder weapon, the mo-
tive for the crime, and the overall story of the murder.
Three Conjectures
Prior to the experiment, we had anticipated three general findings: (1) that the
experimental group would be able to solve the problem; (2) that we would be
flooded with phenomena of reasoning seldom considered in conventional
studies; and (3) that we would be able to observe how the group worked and rea-
soned together to arrive at their solution.
Regarding the first conjecture, both before conducting the experiment and
for a considerable time afterward, we had naively accepted that the solution
of the crime was the one given in the Baker Street game. We had tried to make
finding that solution easier through our development of the individual clues;
at the same time, we had worried that we might be making the crime problem
too easy. As it turned out, the experimental group found the problem quite
difficult. Only by the end of the hour did the group have, for the most part,
an agreed solution of the crime. Even then, members of the group were still
attempting to account for some of the details, and one of the experimental
subjects continued to maintain that two separate crimes had been com-
mitted—one involving the theft of $34.16 from the cash register, the other
involving the murder.
Concerning the second conjecture, the range of the groups’ discussion
and actions surprised us. The group members had difficulty keeping track
of which of the dramatis personae they had eliminated as suspects; they
returned repeatedly to considerations of how they should proceed; they
tried to implement various procedures for reasoning about the problem and
switched intermittently between different lines of inquiry. Substantively, they
considered things such as the nature of a pawnshop’s business, the meaning
of the word “parcel,” the relative physical strengths of newspaper reporters
and theater managers, and the possibility that two of the suspects had collab-
orated with each other, with one of them hiding, possibly for days, in a locked
prop box.
Our third conjecture—that we would be able to observe how the group rea-
soned together to find a solution—was the most problematic. We had difficulty
distancing ourselves from the naturalness and mundaneity of what the members
of the group were doing. They would remind themselves of the uncertain and
conditional character of a current working hypothesis, discuss possible courses
of action that might lead to a summary description of the crime, consider stereo-
typical characteristics of people and essential properties of real-world objects in
order to find ways in which the clues might be related to and inform one another.
They would interrogate the meanings of words, weigh the relative importance of
the details of the crime, and question whether some of the clues had been given
so as to purposefully mislead them.
Although what the experimental group did was unanticipated, we found, in
repeatedly viewing and listening to the video record, that the collaborative actions
of the members of the group were predominantly ordinary, understandable in
and as the course of their deliberations, and seemingly without theoretical in-
terest other than that they were not making the connections or following the in-
ferential procedures that we thought they should. Our aim was to begin to see
people’s ongoing reasoning with each other as the foundational phenomenon of
reasoning: regardless of whatever odd ideas the experimental group considered,
we wanted to examine how the experimental subjects did whatever they were
doing to make their actions and reasoning practically accountable to and for each
other. On that score, although we watched the video over and over, the work of
their reasoning and the distinctiveness of that reasoning as the work of solving
the crime problem remained hidden in the midst of its seemingly unexceptional
character.
A Prejudicial Assumption
Both in designing the experiment and, initially, in trying to analyze the exper-
imental session, we had thought that the explanation of the crime given in the
221B Baker Street game—the “book solution”—was, in fact, the solution of the
crime. This assumption hindered our research considerably. We only began to
understand the work of the experimental group when we realized (1) that the
“book solution” had its own inadequacies, (2) that it was only one of many pos-
sible explanations of the crime, and (3) that trying to explain what the students
were doing in terms of their failure to find the book solution didn’t make par-
ticularly good sense. The conversational fragment in the following drew our at-
tention to these problems and allowed us to begin to attend to what the students
were doing.
Prior to the conversational fragment, the experimental group had reached
seeming agreement that the pawnshop owner Miles Balfour had been killed
using the knight’s broadsword. More immediately, the group was trying to assess
the values of the objects that had been stolen, as well as the values of some pos-
sible objects that the crook had left behind.
In line 1, Chuck, considering this situation, asks why anyone would want to
steal the vase. In response, Bea proposes that vases are things for women and that
the thief probably took it as a present for his wife. Seven seconds of silence follow.
Chuck and Ava’s “okay’s” (lines 14 and 15) indicate that they see—and agree that
they see—no immediate way of building on Bea’s suggestion.
Extract 1 (Time: 23.54)

1 CHU: The thing is why would you steal the vase then.
2 (0.2)
3 AVA: Yeah.
4 (1.0)
5 AVA: Porcel'n_=
6 BEA: =For his wife,
7 (1.3)
8 BEA: It doesn't make sense but (1.5) for a woman like it's-
9 it's for uh-(.) lady like I wouldn't-(0.5) you
10 know why would the guy steal a vase.
11 (2.5)
12 BEA: °It's weird.°
13 (4.0)
14 CHU: 'kay.
15 AVA: Okay .hh ...
At this point, Ava starts a new topic: she begins questioning the mechanics of
how Miles Balfour was stabbed to death and, in lines 22–24, raises the problem
of the crook sneaking up on someone in the pawnshop while lugging around a
broadsword. In response, starting in lines 25–26, the group tries to build a plau-
sible scenario for the murder.
Extract 1 (continued)
15 AVA: O
kay .hh ((reading)) "was found stabbed to death"=How many
16 times was he [stabbed.
17 CHU: [Oh they did-didn't say
18 (1.5)
19 CHU: ((reading)) "behind the main counter of establish[ment."
20 AVA: [Yeah.
21 (0.8)
22 AVA: So I mean (1.2) I'm assuming the armor wasn't close by:.
23 (.) In that (.) he had to the bring the sword to him,
24 ((gesture of a direction of carrying the sword))
25 CHU: >
Okay< let's pretend to be the killer then.=Right we walk
26 intuh thu:h (.) to the sto:re.
27 AVA: Mm hm,
28 CHU: We see: (.) Miles Balfour and he['s
29 AVA: [No we break into the store.=
30 DEB: =[Right
31 CHU: =[Okay so we break into the sto:re,(0.2) Where would Miles
32 Balfour be.
33 DEB: [[Behind the counter.
34 AVA: [[Behind [the counter.
35 CHU: [Probably behind the counter.
36 BEA: Right.
37 CHU: We go over there:.
38 DEB: Well [we
39 CHU: [We=
40 AVA: =grab the sword,
41 DEB: We grab the sword fi[rst
42 CHU: [How do we grab the sword though.=
43 =See the thing is if you walk-if you go in >okay< do it
44 let's say we sneakily. I mean sneak.
45 (1.2)
46 CHU: We sneak
47 DEB: huh huh[huh

48 CHU: [in ( ) .hh and um (.) the sword's s's somewhere:.
49 (0.6)
Chuck continues developing the scenario, attempting to take into account

the weight and awkwardness of the sword, as well as where it might have been
located in the shop. Ava, however, in lines 64–70, now questions how the killer,
carrying the sword, got to the shop owner behind the store counter and physi-
cally managed to commit the murder.
50 CHU: But we need to g-but it’s heavy for us (0.2) tuh (.) to use
51 the swor:d.
52 (1.5)
53 CHU: But we’re ab-we’re able to manage to (0.7) See the broadsword
54 I-I know the broadsword’s pretty lo:ng. ((stretches arms to
55 full arm-span to show its length)) Yeah it is heavy.
56 AVA: Like Excalibur
57 (): [(laughter)
58 CHU: [No like it’s lo:ng. It’s kinda like-
59 DEB: Maybe it was close to her.
60 AVA: Yeah.
61 CHU: Okay so let’s say it’s close
62 DEB: Counter.
63 CHU: Yeah. Let’s say it[’s close to the counter
64 AVA: [But you still have-
65 Are we assuming that (.) like the counter is like (.) across
66 or you can walk around it.
67 (0.3)
68 o
r you believe you jump over the counter ((gestures indicating,
69 first, a possible layout of the counter, second, walking around
70 it and, last, thumping on the table following “jump over”))
71 CHU: See I’m not su:re.
Following Debbie’s suggestions in lines 73 and 76 below, Chuck closes the dis-
cussion in lines 80 and 83–84, stating summarily that Balfour “probably had his
back to [the killer] or something and so the killer took the sword and stabbed
him.” The discussion then shifts with Debbie’s proposal (lines 85 and 87) that the
killer must have been “pretty quick” and “muscled.” Chuck recalls one of Ava’s
individual clues (that “the murder weapon was too unwieldy and heavy for most
women and many men to use”) and, in lines continuing beyond the transcribed
fragment, the group tries, as a way of winnowing the remaining suspects, to com-
pare the relative strengths of the male protagonists.
72 BEA: ( [ )
73 DEB: [Maybe he was just like not looking and then he just
74 like pshhh ((gesture of thrusting a sword forward and stabbing))
75 BEA: Yeah.
76 DEB: Y
ou know what I mean like he was [probably doing stuff=
77 CHU: [Yeah
78 CHU: He was probably doing something like-
79 DEB: and then like
80 CHU: He probably had his back [to him or something
81 DEB: [Yeah and
82 DEB: the swo[rd
83 CHU: [And so (0.8) the killer: took the sword and stabbed
84 [him.
85 DEB: [So the killer must have been like pretty quick and ()
86 CHU: Yeah
87 DEB: muscled to like
88 CHU: which why-which is why which is why we ruled out the women
89 because (0.5) you ((Ava)) said ...
(26.01)
Breaking this conversational sequence into sections helps clarify the devel-
oping structure of the group’s immediate discussion. At the same time, it distorts
the predominant feature of our experience trying to analyze the video recording.
A sense of this experience comes by reading the 89 lines of the transcript straight
through without the commentary. The recorded sequence lasts about two
minutes; the rest of the experimental hour is pretty much more of the same. The
conversation seemed to be going nowhere; rather than moving toward a solution
of the crime, the subjects had trouble resolving almost any feature of it. We un-
derstood and could follow the experimental subjects’ conversation, but the char-
acter of that conversation as the work of solving the crime was elusive.
The breakthrough came when, viewing this part of the video repeatedly, we
realized that we actually agreed with the subjects: if Miles Balfour had been
stabbed with the broadsword behind the main counter, the sequencing of the
murderer’s and Balfour’s actions were difficult to visualize and understand. The
experimental group had found, through their discussion, that the granularity of
detail in the story and clues was insufficient to sustain an interrogation of how the
murder was physically committed. The group ended up settling for the account
that, simply, “the killer took the sword and stabbed him.” This is essentially the
same statement as the first line of the crime story.
For us, the researchers, once the correspondence between the fictional situ-
ation and conceivably real-world actions was questioned, we realized that any
number of scenarios could have resulted in the same summary description of
the crime. While Paulie “The Pick” Chandler might be eliminated as a suspect
because he could pick locks and wouldn’t need to break the front door, he might
not have been able to crack that particular lock or he might have broken the door
as a matter of expediency. Similarly, it’s conceivable if unlikely that two separate
crimes did occur on the same night or that Henry Kirk, as a newspaper reporter
possibly familiar with the museum robbery, recognized the vase when he came
into the pawnshop (to redeem, of all things, some books), and decided to steal it
for himself.
Both in the Baker Street game and in the experimental setting, the crime
story and associated clues were made up; they are works of fiction. There is no
real crime against which to compare the adequacy of reasoning about it, no
real situation that could be inspected and whose details could be interrogated.
The “book solution”—the one given in the board game and the one that we
had naively accepted as the solution—wasn’t the solution of a real-world crime.
We couldn’t hold the experimental group to such a solution, nor could they
possibly hold themselves to it. Whatever the circumstances and reasoning of a
solution to the crime could be, those circumstances and reasoning would have
to be generated and developed in course, in situ, by the members of the exper-
imental group.
The Praxeological Field
Freed from judging the group’s work in terms of a hypothesized correct solu-
tion, we began to see that three features of the experimental session dominated
everything the group was doing. One was the subjects’ continual effort—their
observable work—trying to get mutual agreement about what happened, why
it happened, and who the person or persons were who did it. The second was
that, in engaging in that work of mutual recognition, the subjects were repeat-
edly frustrated reaching it. And, lastly, there was the repetitiveness of the group’s
conversation with, seemingly, very little progress toward a solution of the crime.
The Group’s Work of Building, Preserving, and Monitoring

the Accountability of Its Own Talk and Reasoning
Only a few examples of the subjects’ attempts at establishing accountable features

of the crime will be given here; the next section shows some of the diversity, de-
tail, and range of this work. Once recognized, this work is found everywhere
throughout the experimental session. Conjecturally, the enterprise of trying to
establish the mutually recognized accountability of what was being said about the
crime constituted the group members’ presence to each other as collaborating
members of a problem-solving group.
Consider the following sequence taken from the group’s first reading of
their individual clues. Initially, the discussion may only seem to clarify for the
group what Debbie is reading: in effect, the group is trying to establish how
they would keep track of what they were talking about and, in particular, how
they would refer to one of the possible suspects. At the same time, potentially
relevant details of Debbie’s clue are being emphasized: that the vase was one of
the items missing from the pawnshop and that Phyllis Cahill had sold it to the
pawnshop owner.

1 DEB: ((continuing to read her clues at the beginning of the
2 experimental session)) And the third one is “the missing
3 flower vase was one of the items Phyllis Căhole sold from
4 her husband’s attic.”
5 CHU: The missing what?
6 DEB: Flower vase,
7 CHU: >Okay,<
8 DEB: “was one of the items Phyllis Căhole”
9 CHU: Phyllis::,
10 AVA: Cāhill
11 CHU: [Cāhill
12 DEB: [Cāhill
13 CHU: Cāhill right.
14 DEB: “sold from her husband’s attic,”
15 CHU: So:ld right.
16 DEB: Mm hm.
Some of the technical detail involved in the effort to speak truthfully about
the crime is illustrated in the next fragment. In it, Ava suggests that Henry Kirk
might be the perpetrator: Kirk collects old coins; he may have mistakenly used
one of those coins to redeem his books; later he might have broken into the
pawnshop to retrieve the coin. In making this case, Ava refers to Kirk’s coins as
“expensive,” a word that helps motivate the theft and murder but a word that
doesn’t literally appear in the written clues. Ava immediate corrects herself;
Chuck reinforces the correction while improving the grammar, and Ava accepts
the correction.
Extract 3(Time: 8.39)

1 AVA: [yeah he-maybe he like] paid in cash and he-(.) um he-
2 (0.3) he paid with one of his like expensive coins.
3 well like one of his collecting cul-collector coins.
4 (0.7)
5 CHU: >Collectible coins,<
6 AVA: Collectible (0.2) yeah.
Although one might infer that the coins had some value because they were old
and Kirk was collecting them, the relevant individual clue (which, like all such
clues, had been repeatedly read to the group) says only that “Henry Kirk’s hobby
is collecting old coins and medals.” The qualification of “collectible” makes the
immediately given evidence for Kirk’s culpability less secure.
A similar situation arose when the group tried to examine the physical murder
of Miles Balfour.
Extract 4 (Time: 24.39 [from Ex.1])

1 CHU: >Okay< let’s pretend to be the killer then.=Right we walk
2 intuh thu:h (.) to the sto:re.
3 AVA: Mm hm,
4 CHU: We see: (.) Miles Balfour and he[’s [
5 AVA: [No [we break into the
6 store.=
7 DEB: =[Right
8 CHU: =[Okay so we break into the sto:re,(0.2) Where would Miles
9 Balfour be.
10 DEB: [Behind the counter.
11 AVA: [Behind [the counter.
12 CHU: [Probably behind the counter.
13 BEA: Right.
14 CHU: We go over there:.
Members of the group differentiated between the literal texts of the crime and
what might be said about or inferred from them: while all manner of hypothetical
conjectures might be entertained, this was not the case for matters of textual
“fact.” The account of the crime and the additional clues don’t say that Kirk’s
coins were valuable, nor do they say where Balfour was when the perpetrator
broke (rather than walked) into the store.
Distinguishing in such ongoing ways between “inference” and textual “fact”
served a practical purpose: by maintaining the difference, the group was also
maintaining their uncertainty about the nature of the crime and, therein, the ter-
rain within which and against which a solution might be discovered.
Obstructed Accountability
As a matter of their own recognition, in their attempts to produce mutually rec-

ognized, accountable reasoning, the experimental subjects were continually
frustrated trying to tell a coherent story of the nature and circumstances of the
crime. A member of the group would suggest a possible murderer, a motive for
the crime, or a method for continuing the group’s inquiries; then, as the discus-
sion continued, as further details and the consequences of the suggestion were
considered, the suggestion would come to be seen, often quite quickly, as prob-
lematic if not untenable.
Such situations of occluded accountability might be compared with the
two-dimensional depiction of impossible three-dimensional objects. As in
Figure 14.2, a limited portion of the picture offers no difficulties; it is seen as a
part of a real-world object. However, as our eyes move around the full object,
the local continuities of the object don’t fit together. Somewhat analogously,
while the members of the experimental group would attempt to build a co-
herence of detail for some aspect of the crime, that coherence could only be
maintained for a short period of time.
The following fragment provides an example. It begins with Chuck
addressing the value of the objects taken from the pawnshop. By reading from
the crime story that the pawnshop owner “had only bitter words for his un-
profitable investment,” Chuck seems to be suggesting that the missing objects
have no value because there was nothing of value in the pawnshop to begin
with. Ava counters this proposal with one of her own: Alistair Krebs, the pre-
vious owner, may have realized that he had left something valuable in the shop.
Building on Ava’s statement, Chuck proposes that if this were the case, the item
of value would have to be the English armor. Ava counters again: if the object
of the crime were the armor, why would Krebs take the vase? Moreover, since
the vase had been purchased after the shop had been sold, Krebs wouldn’t have
even known it was there.
Figure 14.2 The Local Coherence of an Impossible Object

1 AVA: .hh hhhhhhh
2 CHU: (
(reading from the crime story)) See “bitter words for his
3 °unprofitable ()°“
4 (2.5)
5 AVA: U
nless Allister Krebs like figured out he sold something
6 r
eally (2.0) like he sold something in the shop that was
7 really expensive and=
8 CHU: =Which was:: (0.8) probably the helmet->I mean< the English
9 °armor°
10 DEB: Yeah. And that’s why he killed him.
11 AVA: Yeh because-But then um the vase wouldn’t come into picture
12 like b’cause [after-
13 CHU: [Yeah cause why would you steal a vase afterwards.
14 AVA: after he sold the store so he wouldn’t have known that
15 vase was in there. (0.5) that’s
16 (1.0)
17 DEB: .hhh Neither would [mixing up people’s names] Wilbur Kirkhill
A little later in the session, Chuck points out that the group had previously
ruled out women as potential murderers. He asks Ava to read once again one of
her personal clues—that “the murder weapon was too unwieldy and heavy for
most women and many men to use.” Ava elaborates on eliminating the female
characters, suggesting that the murderer “must have been a pretty big guy.” The
following fragment begins at this point in the discussion. Chuck offers a compar-
ison between playhouse managers (like Wilbur Partridge) who do heavy lifting,
pull curtains, and are probably muscular guys, and newspaper reporters (like
Henry Kirk) who are “just mainly typing in the office.” Chuck wants to differen-
tiate the male suspects based on their relative strengths. Ava exposes a problem
with this procedure by asking in line 36 about the strength of John Cahill. In this
case, they don’t seem to have any information. Debbie (line 42) tries to rescue
the approach by suggesting that John’s presence in the crime story may be a ruse
to confuse the group. The group has reached an apparent dead end. Chuck then
attempts to institute a new procedure beginning in line 46, this time considering
each of the male subjects one at a time.

1 CHU: Y
eah. (1.0) And to be a playhouse manager there’s lots of
2 um (.) heavy duty things you have to do, (0.8) because
3 you have ( to)( ) like a ( [ ) right,=
4 AVA: [Yeah
5 CHU: =There’s-you know you do that pulleying=
6 BEA: =Uh:
7 AVA: the curtai[ns
8 CHU: [uh the curtains [and
9 AVA: [and
10 CHU: and there’s var[ious props that you have to carry on
11 AVA: [props
12 CHU: stage so I’m-I’m thinking that .hh you probably got to be a
13 muscular gu:y.
14 AVA: Yeah.
15 CHU: But then with the newspaper:
16 BEA: reporter
17 CHU: [[you’re kinda like on
18 AVA: [[then you’re just like in
19 CHU: your [des::k
20 AVA: [desk running around trying to find
21 CHU: >and I mean I’m not trying to do stereotypes< but
22 (0.7)
23 CHU: [assuming
24 AVA: [( )
25 ( ): [( )
26 CHU: but assuming >I mean< assuming
27 AVA: Yeah,
28 CHU: that if he’s a newspaper reporter then he’s just mainly typing
29 in the office he’s not gonna be as physical as someone who .hh
30 makes his living doing lots of physical: (.) [you know (0.8)
31 AVA: [Yeah.
32 CHU: activities.
33 (1.0)
34 CHU: Okay,
35 (0.5)
36 AVA: What about John. Do we know anything about John.
37 BEA: (No) nothing about [John
38 CHU: [There’s not-no information about Jo:hn (.)

39 so we can’t say anything about that. .hhh
40 (0.5)
41 CHU: Ok[ay
42 DEB: [(Perhaps) it’s there to draw us off.
43 CHU: Yeah.=
44 AVA: =Yeah.
45 (0.2)
46 CHU: O
kay well okay.=Let’s let’s take it one at a time then.
47 Let’s let’s assume tha:t (0.4) let’s assume that (1.0)
48 um what’s his face (.) the Partridge guy is the killer
...
A last example of obstructed accountability comes from early in the experi-

mental session. Given that one of his personal clues says that an art object had
been stolen from the museum, Chuck suggests that one of the objects taken from
the pawnshop was the same object that was previously stolen from the museum.
After some effort by the group members to match names and identify who is
who, Chuck begins talking through a general account of the crime with John
Cahill as the perpetrator:

1 CHU: Okay=Well let’s say hypothetically John stole something
2 from the: (0.2) uh (.) museum ri[ght,
3 AVA: [Uh huh
4 DEB: Uh huh
5 CHU: and that he brings it (.) into his house uhm in the
6 attic.=He stores it in the attic .hh and then his wife
7 cleans it, .hh and the:n (0.7) you know som-she sells
8 it right,
9 AVA: Mm Hm
10 CHU: She sells it to the gu:y (0.3) but then uh thi:s-(.)
11 whatever this item i:s which I think is the uh would
12 you say the vā the väz the vāse
13 DEB: Vāse yeah.
Following this fragment, Chuck, unsure of the value of porcelain vases,

questions his own line of reasoning. Ava says that their value depends on
whether they’re old and from China. Bea and Chuck concur. At this point,
in the next fragment, Debbie goes off track and gives an explanation of why
Phyllis Cahill (rather than John) is not the murderer. Chuck, in line 19, also
seems to forget about John Cahill and suggests a different prospective killer
(“the wife of the guy that died”). Bea (lines 26–28) then offers a list of re-
maining potential killers. Chuck and Ava in lines 32–36 extend the list.
Pausing and, it seems, considering the length of the list and the fact that
the preceding discussion has neither clarified nor substantially reduced the
number of suspects, Chuck (lines 36–37) suggests that they return to and go
over the individual clues once again.

1 DEB: I don’t think Phyllis is the-cause like it said that she
2 sold the flower vase I mean the flower vase is missing but then
3 she sold it so unless she wants to buy it back I mean
4 she wants to steal it back but she [( )
5 CHU: [Unless her husband it
6 wants to steal ba:ck.
7 (0.3)
8 DEB: Unless it was her husband but (1.7) but I don’t think
9 it’s he:r.
10 AVA: Yeah.
11 CHU: Oka[:y
12 DEB: [because why would you wanna sell it and then like-
13 un[less it’s her husband who ( )
14 CHU: [( )
15 AVA: Yeah she could always just like buy it back too.
16 CHU: Oka[y
17 DEB: [Yeah
18 (2.2)
19 CHU: And you don’t think it’s the wife (.) of the guy that
20 died,
21 AVA: No:, I mean like just thuh-the sword being so heavy
22 and you know she’s li[ke
23 DEB: [So we can rule out the woman
24 out [of this?
25 CHU: [Okay. So okay let’s rule out the [women,
26 BEA: [the woman
27 and it’s not Phyllis either, (.) so it’s just uh Wilber
28 Partridge and Henry Kirk right,
29 CHU: Wilber:: (.) who?
30 BEA: Partridge, the [( )
31 CHU: [Wilber Partridge, uh Henry Kirk,
32 AVA: (and [ )
33 CHU: [perhaps Alastair Krebs and perhaps Phyllis’s (.)

34 °husband° (1.0) and we ruled out “The Pick.”
35 AVA: Yeah.
36 CHU: I mean Chandler. (1.2) Okay um let’s go over the
37 clues one more time okay,
...
Textures of Detail
A third general feature of the group’s work was the repetitiveness of its consid-
erations—the return to the same clues, to the same concerns about them, and
to the repeating obstruction of almost any partial account of crime. Two issues
of developing, general agreement were that the broadsword was the murder
weapon and that the murderer was a man. Progress toward anything else was
difficult to see.
Discussions regarding the porcelain vase provide an example. Six minutes
into the session, Chuck summarized one of the clues by saying that the vase
belongs to “Miss Cahill”; shortly thereafter Ava proposed that “the string and the
newspaper were used to wrap . . . either the helmet or the vase.” At 10 minutes,
Chuck suggested that the vase could have been the object stolen from the mu-
seum, which led to a discussion of its possible value and, then, to Debbie’s as-
sertion that Phyllis Cahill didn’t commit the pawnshop crime. Shortly after 12
minutes, while the group was again rereading the clues, Chuck offered the vase
or the helmet as very likely the object stolen from the museum. Two minutes
later, while again reading through the clues, Chuck attributed to Ava the idea
that the newspaper and string were probably used to wrap the helmet, to which
Ava added “or the vase.” At 21 minutes, considering the clue that the object
stolen from the museum was from the fifteenth century, Ava asked whether
there was porcelain in the 1400s; she then thought that this could have been
the case in China. The discussion led to a concern over how the vase could
have been carried from the crime scene: if the helmet and vase had both been
wrapped with newspaper and tied with string, it would look like the thief was
carrying two bowling balls.
Giving a quantitative measure of the instances of the discussion of the vase
is difficult. Including when it was just mentioned in the reading of clues doesn’t
seem appropriate; at the same time, one discussion of the role of the vase could
immediately lead to different considerations which, in varying circumstances,
might or might not be treated as a single instance. A conservative estimate of the
substantive discussion of the vase was 14 times in the first 45 minutes of the ex-
perimental hour.
A similarly conservative count is that Henry Kirk was discussed eight or
more times in the first 45 minutes. This included talk about whether he had
taken the newspaper from the pawnshop because, as a newspaper reporter, his
name might have appeared in the paper. At 16.40 minutes, Ava suggested that
Kirk had the strongest motive for the crime because he might have mistakenly
paid to redeem his books with one of his “special” coins and had broken into
the pawnshop to retrieve the coin. At 33.30 minutes, Ava proposed that if Kirk
were the killer, his motive would be “the money” (presumably the retrieval of
his “special” coin), raising again, for the group, the question of why he would
steal the helmet and the vase. At 44 minutes, Chuck suggested that the murderer
could be either Kirk or Partridge, the former because “he likes to collect coins”
and the latter because he’s a “big” (that is, a strong) guy.
Much of our frustration with the group’s conversation was that they didn’t
seem to be making any progress toward solving the crime. Oddly, on reflec-
tion, the group’s actions had some similarity with a practical technique of
discovery work. In the course of reviewing the individual clues and re-exam-
ining things said about them, the details of the crime were nuanced differ-
ently, they became associated in different ways, and they were viewed in
different contexts and in terms of different conjectures: at one time, certain
details were associated with each other and, at another, different (and some-
times new) configurations and relationships between the crime details were
entertained.
This situation had a consequential if indirect effect on the group’s work. The
details of what the members of the group had said about the crime became
overlaid and interwoven, including the compatibilities and inconsistencies
found through their discussion. This process gave increased “texture” to the
crime story and to the group’s search for the coherence of their own tellings of
the crime.
Foregrounding, Focal Distance, Praxeological Coherence
Forty-five minutes into the experimental hour, Ava pointed out a feature of the
crime story and clues that had been neglected in the group’s welter of conjectures,
statements of “fact,” and occluded argumentation. By foregrounding this aspect
of the narrative, Ava was able to build what came to be the group’s basic story of
the crime.
Previous to Ava’s discovery, Chuck had been reiterating his belief that Paulie
“The Pick” had stolen the money in the cash register and that, later, someone
else had broken into the pawnshop, killed Balfour, and taken the other objects.
Undeterred by resistance to his theory, the lack of agreement on the murderer,
and no overall account of the crime or a motive for it, Chuck announced that
he would begin—and did begin—writing “our story” of the crime, referring to
Paulie’s conjectured theft as the “petty crime” (lines 1–4/6). In the ensuing si-
lence as Chuck began writing, Ava started muttering “the vase, the vase, the vase
in John’s attic” and ended up asking why the attic was described as John’s rather
than “their” (John and his wife Phyllis’s) attic. This led her to outline an account
of the crime in lines 31–33:

1 CHU: I
’m-I’m just gonna write thuh (.) the last portion of our:
2 our story, .hh We just need tuh: have a: the chronological
3 p
art of between (0.4) the murder gu:y. Bu(t) I’m just gonna
4 write the petty shop=
5 AVA: =Mm hm
6 CHU: I mean petty: °crime°
7 (12 sec) ((Chuck writing))
8 AVA: HHhhhhh the vase (.) the vase,
9 (1.8)
10 AVA: (°The vase in John’s attic°)
11 (2.5)
12 AVA: Why was it John’s attic.
13 (1.2)
14 AVA: Why isn’t it their attic.
15 (2.0)
16 BEA: >What d’ya mean.<
17 (0.3)
18 CHU: Ye(h)ah why isn’t it their attic,
19 (): hhh[h
20 AVA: [Yeah.=
21 DEB: =Yeah.
22 (1.4)
23 CHU: I mean if you’re husband and wi:fe (.) wouldn’t you:
24 AVA: Isn’t it (0.3) like collective,
25 CHU: Yeah.
26 BEA: Weird thing to ( )
27 CHU: ((talking to himself about what he is writing)) “Sees”
28 (2.5)
29 BEA: (°John’s attic°)
30 (1.0)
31 AVA: John stole the vas:e from: the museum, left it in
32 his attic, (.) his wife found it took it to the pawnshop,
33 (0.4) he went back and stole it,
34 CHU: Yeah I feel like it’s something like that because the
35 wife doesn’t know the value of it,
36 AVA: Yeah.
Much earlier in the experiment, about nine minutes in, Chuck had posited a
similar account. There are, however, a number of differences. First, Chuck makes
the association of the vase with the object stolen from the museum just because
two clues were given, not because of any relationship between them:
okay see the thing the thing with my clue is that a valuable art object from the
sixteenth century was stolen recently from the cultural and natural history
museum if this is the clue a-um it leaves me to believe that one of these items
are pre-was previously stolen
Ava, on the other hand, points to literal features of the crime texts—that the attic
belongs to John but that it was Phyllis, not John, who decided to sell the vase.
Next, the group had trouble establishing whether the vase was valuable. In Ava’s
account the vase is simply the object stolen from the museum without consid-
ering its value. One problem with Chuck’s account remained and stayed with the
group to the end: if the vase was the object of the pawnshop theft, why steal the
helmet?
Whatever bearing these features of the two accounts may have had on their
reception, a more consequential difference lay in the contexts in which they
were given. We tend to think, as a seemingly natural prejudice, that the 221B
Baker Street crime story and clues remained the same throughout the experi-
ment. Phenomenologically, this isn’t correct. Ava’s account was given against
the background and in the midst of 45 minutes of accumulated associations
between the crime details and indeterminacies therein. By foregrounding
the ownership of the attic, much like adjusting a camera lens, Ava provided
the focal distance to begin to review and reassess—to see more clearly—the
details of the crime.
While the metaphor of focal distance seemed clarifying, the critical issue
for us, the researchers, was what the “object” was for which focal distance
was provided. It couldn’t be the real-world truth of the crime (for which
there isn’t any), and it didn’t seem to be how the clues, in and of themselves,
could now be seen as fitting together: following Ava’s proposal, the group
members did not start re-reading and reviewing the clues as they had done
repeatedly up to that point. Instead, the group, including Ava, spent the rest
of the hour rehearsing the details of Ava’s proposal, revisiting their previous
discussions and theories, and comparing those discussions and theories
with Ava’s account.
The following fragment gives the flavor of these discussions. Ava recalls one of
Chuck’s ideas that Paulie “The Pick” Chandler had hidden in the locked prop box
which the playhouse manager Partridge had pawned. The group, however, can’t
establish a reason for Chandler or Partridge doing this. Chuck then suggests that
they consider John Cahill (line 17) as the culprit. Ava points out (lines 19–20)
that Cahill seems “irrelevant” to the crime story, but this lack of his presence
comes to be viewed as a factor supporting his guilt. In this roundabout way, the
fragment ends with Chuck, in lines 35–36, again offering John Cahill’s culpa-
bility as a working hypothesis.

1 AVA: Okay. Like the thing is (.) how you said someone could
2 have been hiding in the:
3 CHU: Yeah,
4 AVA: dusty prop box. (.) what if like Paulie (.) the Pick
5 was in the prop box.
6 (0.5)
7 DEB: Yeah,
8 AVA: But then [it like it doesn’t make sense cause he doesn’t
9 DEB: [(I don’t think so)
10 AVA: have a motive: (.) right?=
11 CHU: =Who doesn’t have a mot’ve.
12 AVA: Partridge.
13 CHU: Partridge?
14 DEB: (Yeah I don’t think)
15 CHU: Yeah. Partridge doesn’t have a motive.
16 DEB: Yeah. (Let’s go with the story we have then.)
17 CHU: Okay. So let’s say John Cahill,
18 (2.0)
19 AVA: But he-you know like is he seems so irrelevant in
20 the story:,
21 DEB: Well maybe-
22 CHU: Who.
23 DEB: that’s
24 AVA: John. Yeah that’s that’s (sounds right)
25 CHU: But maybe that’s why because
26 DEB: Yeah.
27 CHU: I mean even your clue-one of your clues says like you
28 know the police don’t even have a
29 DEB: Yea:h.=
30 AVA: =Yeah.
31 CHU: thing [or information on
32 DEB: [Yeah
33 AVA: the museum robbery. Yeah.
34 (1.7)
35 CHU: Okay let’s say it’s John->what’s his name<
36 John Cahill,
What we came to see from these 15 minutes of reviewing and reworking

the details of the crime is that the actual object of the subjects’ work was not
some version of the-crime-in-itself, whatever that might be, but what group
members themselves had said about the crime: the object of their conversation
was their conversation. Throughout the entire experimental session, they were
continually trying to find and build the consistencies of and continuities in
what they were saying. We came to see this as the search for and the work of
the “praxeological coherence” of their conversation. Ava’s remarks about the
origins of the pawnshop theft and murder brought this into focus, and gave di-
rection to the group’s rehearsing and reworking what they had previously said
and to their attempt to establish the detailed coherence of the story that they
were now trying to tell.
Discussion
Two research recommendations informed our work on the Sherlock Experiment.

One of these is close to the origins of the word “ethnomethodology” (Garfinkel
1974). In 1945 and 1946, Garfinkel had spent time listening to recordings of jury
deliberations, recordings made as part of the University of Chicago Jury Project
(Broeder 1959). Listening to the tapes, Garfinkel didn’t hear the jurors engaged
in legal argumentation or proper scientific reasoning, nor did the jurors’ actions
seem to reflect academic studies of decision-making in small groups. Calling
the envisioned discipline “ethnomethodology,” Garfinkel proposed the study of
people’s methods, studies of the ways that ordinary people—like jurists in a jury
room, but also like people waiting for an elevator, ordering dinner in a restau-
rant, or driving through crowded four-way stop intersections—go about their
ordinary, everyday affairs.
Prior to developing our experiment, we had become dissatisfied with
psychological experiments of reasoning: the theorizing associated with the
experiments seemed abstract, in-house, and self-sustaining; the solutions of
the experimental test questions typically involved mathematical reasoning
unlikely to be familiar to most of the experimental subjects; how the exper-
imental subjects came to give the answers that they gave was unexplored;
and the experiment procedures that were used precluded any interest in the
possible social dimensions of reasoning. Our aim was to create an experi-
mental situation where we could literally observe people reasoning together.
We adopted this approach because, at the time and still today, it seems like a
sensible thing to do.
A second research directive was embedded in Garfinkel’s teaching in the
1970s. The recommendation—itself one form of “reflexivity”—might be called
the “thesis of the radically situated, locally produced practical accountability
of practical action and reasoning.” A problem and, equally, a challenge for
researchers is associated with this recommendation: it doesn’t tell us, for any spe-
cific setting, what might be discovered or how someone might discover it. It isn’t
clear what it might mean for people driving in traffic, ordering dinner in a restau-
rant or, for that matter, the subjects of the Sherlock Experiment.
One of our findings is that, from the very beginning, from the first reading
of the individual clues, the experimental subjects oriented to what they them-
selves were saying about the crime; they were looking into what they were
saying to find whatever they would find a solution to be. They had no access
to any supposedly objective, situationally independent account of the crime;
they had no access to “the objective facts.” What they did have was what they
were saying to each other, and the subjects oriented to what they had said and
were saying to find what, in their immediate circumstances, they were doing
together.
Not only was the group orienting to what they were saying, they were continu-
ally and specifically focused on the accountability of what they were saying—dis-
tinguishing between what was true and what was only probably true, demarking
hypothetical considerations, correcting seeming misstatements of “fact,”

soliciting agreement, recognizing the obstructed character of such concerns,
and instigating new ways of proceeding to try to circumvent such problems. We,
the researchers, weren’t importing our concerns about accountability into the
experimental setting; the experimental subjects themselves were predominantly
concerned with the accountability of what they were saying. And they were con-
cerned for a very practical reason: through and as their conversation, they were
building and maintaining, for themselves, the locally perceived grounds for in-
quiry into and for inference about the crime.
Ava’s questioning of the ownership of the Cahill’s attic foregrounded a feature
of the crime that had hitherto been neglected. Against the background of the
group’s previous considerations, it led Ava to give, quite quickly, what seemed to
us a clear, persuasive account of the crime. However, what the group then did, in-
cluding Ava, was start reviewing, reconsidering, and re-evaluating their previous
theorizing about the crime. They also started retelling and embellishing the new
account. A solution of the crime problem was, for them, the exhibited coherence
of what they could say about the crime. This is what they had been looking for in
their conversation, what they had tried to cultivate through that conversation,
and what they were now, once again, trying to find and establish.
Through the experiment we wanted to address the question of what rea-
soning consists of as observable phenomena. The widespread prejudice is that
reasoning is a mental or cognitive process. The Sherlock Experiment offered
a different picture of reasoning, as a situated process belonging to a group of
people reasoning together. What we observed the members of the group doing
to solve the crime problem were their ways of reasoning, autochthonous to their
own practices.
If reasoning is seen as a cognitive, individual process whose validity is based
on formal logic or mathematical ratiocination, the experimental group exhibited
a distortion, if not the utter failure, of such reasoning. On the other hand, if we
give primacy to the observable work of people organizing what they’re doing to-
gether, the domain of psychologists’ phenomena of reasoning begins to appear
as a cultivated, encultured, limiting, and somewhat precious feature of their own
research practices. In the Sherlock Experiment, we wanted to see what living rea-
soning might look like, in and as the experimental group’s own developing, in-
digenous practices of trying to solve the crime problem. Our aim was to show
that this type of reasoning can be investigated as observable phenomena and,
in fact, that we could observe the collaborative production of accountable rea-
soning in an experimental setting.
Acknowledgments
We thank Fiona Utley for the suggestion that a crime game might be used to help
reveal idiosyncrasies of people’s reasoning and Sara Saleh for a draft transcript
of the experimental session. We are indebted as well to Michelle Arens, Chuck
Livingston, and Doug Maynard for their comments on, respectively, different
versions of the chapter. Eric Livingston thanks Estrid Sørensen and the Mercator
Research Group 2 for a year appointment as a Senior Research Fellow at the Ruhr
University Bochum, giving him the opportunity to work further on the project.
All procedures for the implementation of the experiment, including its videotape
recording, were approved by UCLA Human Subjects Protection Committee IRB
#G08-01-055-01. Pseudonyms have replaced the experimental subjects’ names
throughout the paper.
Appendix A
A Solution to the Problem in Figure 14.1
Figure 14.1 at the beginning of this chapter gives a test question from a psy-
chology experiment by Goldvarg and Johnson-Laird (2000):
Only one of the following premises is true about a particular hand of cards:
If there is a king in the hand, then there is an ace.

If there is a queen in the hand, then there is an ace.
If there is a jack in the hand, then there is a ten.
Is it possible that there is an ace in the hand?
The question might be answered as follows:
Suppose that there is an ace in the hand. By formal logic, if there is an ace in the
hand, it is true that if there is a king in the hand, then there is an ace. This has
nothing to do with some type of causality between kings and aces, only with the
fact that an ace is already known to be in the hand. Similarly, if there is an ace in
the hand, it is true that if there is a queen in the hand, then there is an ace in the
hand. The first sentence of the problem says that only one of the listed premises is
true. If there is an ace in the hand, then two of the premises are true, so there can’t
be an ace in the hand.
Of the 20 psychology students taking the experiment, 19 of them gave the

wrong answer. The experiment consisted of 16 such questions and lasted 20
minutes. Goldvarg and Johnson-Laird develop an elaborate cognitive model

explaining why the students, none of whom had any training in logic, gave their
answers. It is unclear how the students actually came up with the answers that
they gave, how they thought they came up with their answers, or how they came
to write the answers that they gave.
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15
Technology in Practice
Christian Heath and Paul Luff
Introduction
Ethnomethodology has made an important contribution to our understanding

of technology and social action. It has had a significant impact on research within
the social sciences and contemporary developments in computer science and
engineering, and influenced the development of a number of interdisciplinary
fields, including human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported
cooperative work (CSCW). It has provided the foundation for an analytic and
methodological reorientation of technology and generated a substantial corpus
of research concerned with the ways in which tools and technologies feature in
the concerted accomplishment of practical action. In short, ethnomethodolog-
ical studies have enabled a reconceptualization of technology, exploring its social
and interactional foundations.
It was Suchman’s (1987, 2007) pioneering discussion of artificial intelligence
(AI) and HCI that helped provoke ethnomethodological studies of technology.
Drawing on Garfinkel’s (1967) discussion of the indexical properties of practical
action and the contingent application of rules, Suchman (1987, 2007) drew at-
tention to the shortcomings of goal oriented, plan-based models of social ac-
tion, models that then underpinned AI and the analysis of HCI. She pointed
to the situated character of rules, in particular plans and scripts, and how their
deployment and intelligibility are embedded within common-sense knowledge
and practical reasoning. In seeking to explain the use of computational systems
with regard to rule-governed behavior, Suchman argued that we disregard the
skills and competences, the agency, on which people rely in the situated pro-
duction of social action. The argument gained traction by virtue of Suchman’s
position within a leading systems laboratory and a growing interest within com-
puter science and engineering in finding new methods to inform the design of
and requirements for advanced technologies. These initiatives foreshadowed the
emergence of a substantial corpus of ethnomethodological studies of technology,
studies that prioritized the analysis of “situated activity systems” (Goffman 1963),
the structures and practice of ordinary action in which tools and technologies
are “made at home in the world”—to borrow the phrase from Sacks (1992:548).

Technology in Practice 399
The analytic concern with the contingent deployment of rules, and the
ways in which rules gain their sense and significance within the practical
circumstances of social action, is reflected in a substantial corpus of eth-
nomethodological studies of technology. An important strand of this re-
search has addressed the ways in which plans, schedules, and procedures are
embedded within computer-and paper-based systems and explores how
working knowledge and practical reasoning enable the collaborative pro-
duction of organizational activities. Consider for example, studies of call
centers that examine how operators, in their interaction with callers, con-
tingently deploy the data presented by a system to produce organizationally
relevant assessments and accounts (Whalen 1995; Whalen and Vinkhuyzen
2000; Whalen, Whalen, and Henderson 2002; Whalen and Zimmerman
2005), or how production managers schedule and reschedule work flows
and make these changes visible in ways that are sensitive to the contingen-
cies of the organization’s requirements (Bowers, Button, and Sharrock 1995;
Button and Sharrock 1997, 2002). Studies of complex computer-based sys-
tems exposed the resilience of more mundane tools and artifacts, including
paper documents that proved surprisingly resistant to digital transformation.
For example, studies of air traffic control and the paper flight strip (Harper,
Hughes, and Shapiro 1991), of design and the significance of drawings and
sketches (Büscher et al. 1999; Luff, Heath, and Pitsch 2009; Murphy 2004), and
of urban transport networks and the paper timetable (Filippi and Theureau
1993; Heath and Luff 1992) have exposed the complexities that enable the
use of such basic artifacts as documents, diaries, and notepads (Harper 1998;
Harper and Sellen 2000). These studies draw analytic attention to the insti-
tutional character of technology, the ways in which tools and technologies
feature in the collaborative and contingent production of work and the com-
plex forms of knowledge, practice, and reasoning that enable the concerted
accomplishment of social action.
Alongside the burgeoning corpus of workplace studies (see, for example,
Button 1993; Engeström and Middleton 1996; Heath and Button 2002; Luff,
Hindmarsh, and Heath 2000; Rawls 2008; Rouncefield and Tolmie 2011;
Szymanski and Whalen 2011), we have witnessed the emergence of a broad
range of research that addresses phenomena, activities, and domains not typ-
ically associated with studies in ethnomethodology. These initiatives have
been facilitated by close collaboration with computer scientists and engin-
eers, and through developments in digital technology over the last two or three
decades. Consider, for example, ethnomethodological studies of the home and
of the ways in which members of the family rely upon a complex assortment
of tools, technologies, objects, and artifacts to order and organize their eve-
ryday activities (Hughes et al. 2000; Licoppe 2017; Swan, Taylor, and Harper
2008; Tolmie et al. 2002). We have also seen a growing interest in exploring
how technologies, ranging from mobile devices to highly sophisticated virtual
environments, inform and transform the ways in which people experience and
engage art, science, and performance (Hemmings et al. 2000; Hindmarsh et al.
2005; vom Lehn 2013; vom Lehn, Heath, and Hindmarsh 2001); studies that
expose the practices through which participants, in interaction with others,
encounter and make sense of seemingly unique objects, artifacts, and envir-
onments that encompass both the material and the digital (Licoppe and Morel
2014; Mondada 2014).
This growing interest in the use of novel and in some cases prototype tech-
nologies, installations, and environments poses important methodological
challenges for ethnomethodology with its commitment to the analysis of nat-
urally occurring activities within everyday settings. Drawing inspiration from
Garfinkel’s (1967) well-known breaching experiments, there is a growing interest
in undertaking various forms of naturalistic or quasi-naturalistic experiments
to explore the use of particular tools and technologies (Benford et al. 2006;
Crabtree 2004; Flintham et al. 2003; Fraser et al. 1999; Hindmarsh et al. 2001).
These studies include both laboratory and field experiments. They have made
an important contribution to the design and development of particular systems
and more fundamentally revealed phenomena that hitherto remained unex-
plored, such as the background expectancies, presuppositions, and procedures
on which participants rely in rendering intelligible the unfamiliar, the unusual,
and in some cases, seemingly bizarre. These studies powerfully demonstrate how
the naturalistic experiment can indeed serve as an “aid to sluggish imagination”
(Garfinkel 1967:38) for the analysis of practical action.
More generally, studies of technology reveal a methodological diversity
that is less evident in other fields of ethnomethodological research but is re-
flected in the substantial corpus of studies within CSCW and HCI that draw
on the analytic commitments found within ethnomethodology. This meth-
odological diversity in studies of technology is perhaps most clearly exem-
plified in studies of command and control centers—settings that Suchman
(1997) aptly characterised as “centres of coordination.” Alongside a number
of important ethnomethodologically-informed ethnographic studies (e.g.,
Harper et al. 1991; Hughes et al. 1988), we have witnessed the emergence of
a growing corpus of video-based field studies that address the ways in which
tools and technologies, ranging from simple artifacts to complex multimedia
systems, feature in command and control; research that is inspired by conver-
sation analysis (Goodwin and Goodwin 1996; Heath and Luff 1996; Suchman
1996). These studies have addressed analytic concerns that remained rel-
atively unexplored within research on language use and interaction, in par-
ticular the highly contingent forms of co- participation that arise in the
collaborative accomplishment of specialized tasks, tasks that rely on the con-

current contributions of multiple participants both co-located and remote.
They draw analytic attention towards the ways in which tools and technologies
provide resources to recognize and manage incidents and events, just as the
emergent interaction reflexively constitutes the occasioned sense and signif-
icance of data, images, displays, instructions, and the like. While prioritizing
the analysis of the interactional foundations of institutional activities, these
studies are concerned with addressing the endogenous characteristics of work
and technology and the resources on which participants rely in the concerted
and contingent production of practical action. Of necessity, these studies rely
upon extensive fieldwork alongside the use of recorded data and seek to drive
analytic attention toward the “haecceities,” the “thisness,” of particular phe-
nomena and practices (Garfinkel 1988).
Surveillance: Rendering Scenes Intelligible
One of the more pervasive technologies within command and control is closed
circuit television, or CCTV as it is commonly known. CCTV provides an impor-
tant resource for the real-time surveillance of human behavior and is widely used
in such areas as security operations, policing, traffic management, and manu-
facturing. The widespread deployment of CCTV within public areas, including
malls, city streets, football stadia, railway stations, and the like have led to a cor-
responding rise in a particular form of workplace, namely the operations or con-
trol center; a setting in which personnel use CCTV and related information and
communication systems to detect and manage problems that can be a threat to
public safety and security.
CCTV and surveillance provide the opportunity to explore an issue that has
been of long-standing interest to the social sciences yet has proved analyti-
cally challenging, namely behavior in public places (see, for example, Goffman
1963; Joseph 1998; Lee and Watson 1993; vom Lehn 2013). Garfinkel’s dis-
cussion of perspicuous settings provides a distinctive approach to addressing
such matters:
To find a perspicuous setting the EM policy provides that the analyst looks to
find, as of the haecceities of some local gang’s work affairs, the organizational
thing that they are up against and that they can be brought to teach the ana-
lyst what he needs to learn and to know from them, with which, by learning
from them, to teach them what their affairs consist of as locally produced, lo-
cally occasioned, and locally ordered, locally described, locally questionable,
counted, recorded, observed, etc., phenomena of order, in and as of their in
vivo accountably doable coherent and cogent detail for each another next first
time. (Garfinkel 2002:182)
Personnel responsible for the surveillance of public behavior provide an oppor-

tunity to explore the ways in which local “experts” scrutinize patterns of con-
duct and interaction and resolve the problems and difficulties that arise. They
have a professional expertise in the use of video for specific purposes (Broth,
Laurier, and Mondada 2014; Goodwin 1994; Hindmarsh and Heath 1998). It
enables us to consider how a technology such as CCTV is embedded within
the practicalities of managing public space and the ways in which the sense and
significance of the numerous images afforded by CCTV are embedded within
a working knowledge of the local ecology and its routine and operational char-
acteristics. Indeed, video-based ethnomethodological and conversation ana-
lytic studies of work and interaction provide an opportunity to consider the
ways in which video is an important resource in the accomplishment of a di-
verse range of professional and organizational activities. Indeed, these studies
can offer insights into an emerging form of what might be called professional
video analysis.
Take, for instance, the operation of rapid urban transit networks, networks
that carry substantial numbers of passengers everyday and suffer familiar
problems such as overcrowding, breakdowns, and security threats. In London
Underground, a network that handles nearly five million passenger journeys
per day, we find a complex system of cameras throughout most major sta-
tions that are accessed by a series of station and line control centers, as well as
the police and security services. Each major station of London Underground
houses an operations center, or “ops room” for short. Aside from various com-
munication and information systems, including public address, staff radio, and
monitors showing local traffic data, the principal technology consists of a net-
work of cameras positioned throughout the station. In major stations the su-
pervisor can have access to over 150 cameras, of which eight or so views can
be selected at any one time. These electronic views are augmented by a large,
panoramic window that provides supervisors with the opportunity to view
a principal area of the station, typically the main entrance and ticket hall
(see Figure 15.1).
The CCTV system is the responsibility of the station supervisor based in the
operations room. The supervisor is assisted by up to 30 additional staff, sta-
tion assistants based in different locations throughout the station—in the en-
trance foyer(s), the connecting passageways, and on platforms. A station such
as Victoria, among the busiest on London Underground, provides access to a
number of lines on the Underground and the overland rail network that serves
major conurbations and dormitory towns of South East England. The operation
Figure 15.1 Diagram above: An isometric projection of Victoria Station giving a

three dimensional impression of the complexity of the station. The foyers are shown
towards the top left of the image and the platforms on the bottom right. These are
connected by numerous escalators, corridors and stairs on several levels. Above right:
An image of the Station Operation Room in Victoria Station showing the bank of
CCTV monitors.
of the station routinely suffers a range of incidents and disruptions. These in-
clude, for example, overcrowding, accidents, thefts, robberies, fights, unruly
passengers, security threats (suspect packages and the like), and people falling
onto the track, known euphemistically in London Underground as “one
unders.”
The widespread deployment of CCTV and the corresponding development
of surveillance centers have led to a growing recognition that the “human
operator” may become overwhelmed by information and unable to reliably
monitor all available data. It is suggested that “cognitive overload” can become
a pervasive problem and that it could undermine the ability of personnel to
detect and manage potentially significant incidents and events. In this re-
gard there has been a long-standing interest in developing information sys-
tems (image recognition systems) that analyze real-time data from CCTV
cameras and automatically identify particular incidents and events. The
materials discussed in this chapter were gathered as part of a pan-European
project called PRISMATICA primarily concerned with developing systems
that could be deployed within the operation centers of rapid urban trans-
port networks to assist operators in discovering and identifying incidents and
events (Velastin et al. 2002). For reasons that will become clear, the design
and deployment of the systems posed significant challenges for both the de-
velopment teams and senior management of the various European transport
operators.
The Temporal-Spatial Character of Problems and Difficulties
In contrast to the more common understanding of surveillance and moni-

toring, supervisors are highly selective in what they look for and when. At
any time of the day or night, it is necessary for the supervisor to configure
the CCTV system and choose no more than eight views—views that maxi-
mize the possibility of detecting incidents and potential threats to safety and
security.
Staff orient to the temporal character to the problems and difficulties.
Certain stations suffer severe overcrowding on a daily basis, but not every day,
only during the working week, and not at any time during the day, but nor-
mally during the morning and evening rush hours. Other stations will suffer
overcrowding at different times of the day, so for example Piccadilly Circus is
busy with “theater traffic” late on Friday and Saturday evenings, just as Oxford
Circus is packed with shoppers on Saturday afternoons. Many incidents and
events have this temporal structure to their occurrence. Touts and beggars ply
their trade at certain times of the day and evening, as do pickpockets and drug
dealers, just as unruly and dangerous behavior, drunkenness, vandalism, even
“one unders,” tend to arise at certain times of the day, of the week, even the year.
Major events, such as football matches, the Trooping of the Colour, Wimbledon
Fortnight, the opening of Parliament, visiting dignitaries, the Notting Hill
Carnival, New Year’s Eve, even school holidays, have an impact on the character
and qualities of human traffic that passes through the Underground and the
problems and incidents that arise. In different ways, these and numerous other
events and happenings are relevant to the ways in which supervisors will con-
figure the CCTV system and the sorts of problems and difficulties that will be
discovered, identified, and managed.
The temporal character of incidents and events is inextricably bound to their
geographical location. Particular stations on the network suffer certain problems
but not others, certain incidents and events arise in particular locations at cer-
tain times of the day, the week, and so forth. For example, major national and
international events will have an impact on certain stations, just as problems
such as thieving, begging, drug dealing, drinking, and even “one unders” arise
in particular stations but rarely others. The geographical distribution of problems
and difficulties is not simply confined to stations or sections of the networks, but
to particular areas and regions of stations. So, for example, at Victoria Station,
the Northbound Victoria Line platform is frequently overcrowded during the
morning rush hour, but there are relatively few problems on the other lines that
pass through the station at that time. Whereas during the evening rush hour, it
is the Southbound platform that can suffer overcrowding. Indeed most, if not
all, incidents routinely arise within specific locations within stations. So, for
example, we find drug dealing in the public toilets at Piccadilly, pickpocketing

on the upward escalators at Oxford Circus, ticket touting in the entrance foyer
at Victoria, begging in the interconnecting passageways at Leicester Square, and
“one unders” on the Eastbound platform at Mile End Road.
Familiarity with the temporal and geographical distribution of incidents
and events, and more generally knowledge of the routine patterns of conduct
and interaction that arise within a station, its platforms, foyers, passageways,
and the like, is a critical resource in discovering and identifying incidents and
events. Station supervisors select and configure an arrangement of views, at
particular times of the day, to enable the detection and management of likely
problems and difficulties. The scenes, the various views afforded by the CCTV
system, are selected and rendered intelligible by virtue of the supervisor’s
working knowledge of and familiarity with the station; the routine patterns
of conduct and interaction, the typical characteristics of passengers, the
problems and difficulties that routinely arise, and even how particular
incidents and events are routinely managed. The CCTV monitors reflexively
constitute the sense and significance of areas and activities within the station,
just as knowing the station and its ways informs how images are selected,
seen, and inspected.
Recognizing Overcrowding: Deploying Organization
Like other rapid urban transport networks, overcrowding during the weekday
rush hours is a pervasive feature of many stations on London Underground.
Overcrowding undermines the free flow of traffic through the station, it causes
discomfort and irritation to passengers, and poses dangers—people tripping on
escalators and staircases and more severely, falling from the platform onto the
track due to the pressure of crowds. There has been a long-standing interest in
developing “intelligent” systems that automatically detect overcrowding and fa-
cilitate intervention by staff. The automatic detection of overcrowding was one
of the principal issues addressed by PRISMATICA (Velastin et al. 1993; Velastin
and Remagnino 2006). Despite substantial research and development, the de-
ployment of a system that can reliably identify overcrowding has met with little
success.
It is worthwhile considering the following fragment (Fragment 1, Figure 15.2),
drawn from the rush hour at Victoria Station in central London. The supervisor
is looking through the window at passengers passing through the entrance foyer.
He glances down at a monitor that displays the northbound Victoria Line plat-
form and immediately delivers the following announcement(s).
Looking at the foyer Looking at the monitor

1 SS: Station control way in please <station
2 control vic way in please.
3 (0.4)
4 SS: Ladies and gentlemen we are asking you
5 please to remain behind the barriers.
6 Remain behind the barriers: please.
7 Remain behind the barriers.
Figure 15.2 Fragment 1
The intervention is designed to avoid overcrowding on the northbound plat-

form. It seeks to implement “station control.” This requires station staff to tem-
porarily hold passengers at the ticket barriers until the platform becomes less
congested. In more severe cases, passengers are held outside of the main entrances
to the station. The first part of the announcement is addressed to the three station
assistants who are manning the ticket barriers, the second, to the passengers en-
tering and crossing the entrance foyer. Within a few moments, lengthy queues
begin to develop at the ticket barriers and a small number of passengers attempt
to push past station staff. Three or four minutes later, after a train has removed
waiting passengers from the crowded platform, the supervisor informs staff that
they can allow people to once again pass through the ticket barriers.
The supervisor makes a practical assessment of overcrowding and implements
a course of action to reduce the number of passengers arriving on the platform.
The assessment is not based on seeing that the platform is crowded—it is crowded
most of the time during the morning rush hour. Rather, the assessment involves
consideration of the number and flow of passengers within two seemingly dis-
tinct domains—the entrance foyer and, at some distance below ground, the
Northbound Victoria Line platform. Seeing substantial numbers of passengers
entering and passing through the entrance foyer and, at a glance, a crowded
platform, the supervisor implements station control to delay the progress of
passengers and thereby avoids the risk of waiting passengers being forced to the
edge, or worse still, off the platform onto the track. The sense and significance
of the CCTV image of the crowded platform does not stand independently of
other views and areas within the station. They form an occasioned gestalt through
which a potential incident is recognized and managed. Whether the station or a
particular area of the station is becoming overcrowded necessitates the contingent

interrelation of various scenes; it is not simply based on the density of passengers
gathered in one particular area of the station. In selecting a set of CCTV images,
therefore, the supervisor is sensitive to common problems and difficulties and the
ways in which routine patterns of passenger flow and navigation through the sta-
tion render relevant, interdependencies between conduct and scenes.
Other considerations come into play. Seeing or envisaging whether the plat-
form is overcrowded depends upon the flow of traffic through the station. Trains
rapidly remove substantial numbers of passengers from platforms, so deciding
whether an area is overcrowded or is about to be overcrowded depends on when
a train is likely to arrive. In the case at hand, the supervisor knows the service is
operating “normally,” that the next train will arrive within two minutes, and by
that time, looking at the foyer, congestion on the platform will become severe.
The sense and significance of the CCTV images, the ways in which they are seen
and inspected, are accomplished with regard to the presupposed, routine opera-
tion of the service and how it will bear, or could bear, upon the flow and removal
of human traffic.
In configuring a number of potentially interrelated scenes, therefore, the su-
pervisor is prospectively oriented. He considers the state of play in various, po-
tentially interdependent domains, and how the pace and pattern of human
navigation and arriving trains will rapidly transform the scenes in ques-
tion. In implementing station control, therefore, by holding passengers at the
ticket barriers or even outside the station, the supervisor is not responding to
“overcrowding” on a particular platform, but rather envisaging what could and
is likely to happen unless remedial action is taken before the problem arises. The
determination of whether a platform is crowded or not does not derive from a
simple assessment of the density of passengers gathered in particular regions
of the station, but juxtaposing that view with other scenes, and envisaging how
patterns of passenger and vehicle movement will transform the scene in ques-
tion. The “reading” or “interpretation” of a particular image,—an image of an
“overcrowded” platform which may seem “obvious”—is dependent upon the
supervisor’s ability to invoke a complex configuration of scenes, actions, and
events, and to envisage just what it might take for it to become a threat to safety.
A single scene or image, without knowing what is happening elsewhere, or
envisaging what is about to happen, does not provide the resources to enable
supervisors to recognize potential overcrowding, that is, to produce an opera-
tionally relevant definition and initiate an organizational solution.
The discovery and identification of problems and difficulties are interwoven
with the ways in which those difficulties are routinely and accountably man-
aged. The discovery of particular incidents and events serve to occasion routine
courses of action that serve to re-establish, if only temporarily, the “proper” order
of the station and the routine patterns of navigation and traffic flow it affords.
To resolve particular problems, supervisors issue a series of instructions that
reconfigure the conduct and interaction of staff and passengers. Through these
instructions, they deploy an organizational arrangement that serves to trans-
form, in an orderly patterned manner, the progress of passengers and thereby
resolve potential overcrowding in the station.
Considering Fragment 1, the announcement involves distinct, but interre-
lated actions, designed to engender particular activities from different categories
of participants. “Station control way in please <station control vic way in please”
(lines 1–2) is for the three station assistants, to have them temporarily hold
passengers at the barriers; “Ladies and gentlemen we are asking you please to
remain behind the barriers” (lines 4–5) is addressed to passengers to have them
wait and queue in an orderly manner, until staff give the all clear. It provides those
entering the foyer with the resources with which to make sense, to recognize, the
actions of the station assistants and to produce sequentially relevant conduct—to
wait and form an orderly queue at the barriers. It also provides passengers with
ways of seeing the conduct of fellow passengers and the resources with which to
coordinate their actions with others, to create an arrangement that will enable
an orderly process through the barriers once the ‘all clear’ is received. The an-
nouncement creates and deploys an interactional and sequential organization
through which staff and passengers are able to make sense of each other’s con-
duct and coordinate their actions with each other.
The organization that the supervisor seeks to deploy provides the resources
with which to determine whether passengers are producing the sequentially
appropriate conduct, that is, responding to the announcement and the actions
of the station assistants. Watching the action in the foyer for a few moments,
the supervisor repeats the request, or transforms the request into an instruc-
tion: “Remain behind the barriers: please. Remain behind the barriers”
(lines 6–7). The instruction is addressed to a number of passengers who are
attempting to force their way past the station assistants and, more generally, to
those now entering the foyer who may not have heard the original announce-
ment. Within a short time queues form the length of the foyer; an order is es-
tablished that temporarily transforms the routine pattern of traffic within the
station, enabling crowds to be removed from platforms so that passengers can
be released at the barriers.
The selection and inspection of CCTV images provides the resources both
to identify particular problems and to deploy an organization that serves to re-
solve those difficulties. It enables staff to determine how particular passengers
respond to requests and instructions, and to assess the actions of those on the
ground, responsible for the implementation of particular courses of action.
Take, for instance, the discovery of a suspect package and station evacuation,
an incident that it is all too familiar during times of heightened terrorist threat.
An evacuation is typically foreshadowed by the issue of a coded instruction for
staff (“Inspector Sands to the Operations Room” or equivalent), followed by suc-
cessive public announcements. The announcements, for example, “Attention
please: all passengers on the station: (.) this station is being evacuated because
of a security alert,” serve to transform the ways in which passengers see and
make sense of the conduct of fellow passengers, of staff, of gatherings, patterns of
movement, and so forth. They provide the resources to enable the supervisor to
determine whether people are acting in accord with the instruction. Successive
announcements serve to deploy an organization, or reorganization of con-
duct, and to implement remedial action, if the sequentially relevant activities
do not arise. Indeed, successive announcements are routinely issued to address
recalcitrant passengers in particular areas who are failing to produce the rele-
vant courses of action. It is not unusual for particular announcements to have
a double-edged sequential implicativeness, on the one hand to have passengers
leave the station with dispatch, on the other to instruct staff to deal with certain
recalcitrant groups who are reluctant to leave. In turn, in selecting a series of
CCTV images, the supervisor can determine whether passengers, and for that
matter, staff, are undertaking the courses of action rendered sequentially rele-
vant through successive announcements.
Identifying Misdemeanors and the Well-Behaved Passenger
The operation of rapid urban transport networks relies upon the “well-behaved”
passenger. For station staff and fellow passengers, the orderly and organized pro-
cess of passengers through the station is dependent upon people who are familiar
with the structure and layout of the station, the ways in which particular equip-
ment operates, and the appropriate pathways and the patterns of navigation
that enable smooth access to foyers, platforms, trains, and exits. It relies upon
passengers who are aware of the routine problems and difficulties that arise, such
as overcrowding, delays, even evacuations—passengers who will produce the
circumstantially relevant forms of conduct that enable a reasonable service to be
maintained. For all practical purposes, the well-behaved passenger passes un-
noticed and is unnoticeable, a familiar object within a known ecology, who (re)
produces organizationally relevant courses of action in concert and coordination
with others—namely, like-minded passengers.
The familiar and the routine, “normal appearances” to coin Sacks’s (1972)
phrase, provide supervisors with ways to watch and scrutinize CCTV images, to
notice the less familiar and the untoward. Seemingly insignificant differences in
an individual’s conduct, ways of walking, looking, dressing, standing, carrying
objects, gathering together, and many other things besides, are noticed by virtue
of the ways in which they stand in contrast to the familiar and the routine, the
conduct of well-behaved passengers. Consider, for example, individuals who
walk “unsteadily” along the platform who might be “the worse for wear,” those
that carry musical instruments and other equipment who may be planning to
busk, those who repeatedly fail to catch the train and may intend to jump in front
of a train. Indeed, the most delicate features of conduct and appearance, unno-
ticeable to the untrained eye, are noticed and recognized as organizationally rel-
evant. Take, for instance, pickpockets. In a station such as Oxford Circus, the
supervisor selects CCTV views of the upward escalators during peak shopping
times, and scrutinizes the behavior of passengers to determine whether some
are looking toward peoples’ rear pockets or bags rather than, more commonly,
the advertisements on the wall or the back of the person in front. In detecting
one or two suspects the supervisor will produce a series of announcements, such
as, “Passengers should be aware that pickpockets are operating on this station.”
These announcements are as much concerned with warning pickpockets they
have been spotted as they are with having passengers take more care of their
belongings.
Many problems and difficulties are noticed therefore by virtue of how they
stand in contrast to the normal and the routine, and the ways in which they ex-
hibit typical and familiar characteristics—characteristics that provide schemes
of interpretation that enable the recognition and determination of particular
forms of conduct and appearance.
Consider the following fragment. Three youths enter the ticket hall together and
move toward the perimeter of the hall. They then separate and walk toward the
ticket barriers, each young man heading toward a different gate. As they each near
a gate, they momentarily stall to enable a passenger to enter the ticket barrier. They
then slip close behind and pass through the barriers without using a ticket or card.
Supervisors notice such conduct by virtue of how it stands in contrast to the
ways in which passengers ordinarily navigate the ticket hall and the activities
Figure 15.3 three ‘doublers ‘walking across foyer from right to left, then each
passing through the gates without a ticket.
in which they engage. Rather than immediately walk across the hall toward
the ticket barrier or the ticket machines, the young men move to the perimeter
while watching other passengers approaching the barriers. The conduct of the
youths is noticeable and recognizable, even prior to performing the illegal act,
both by virtue of the how their conduct stands in contrast to the well-behaved
passenger, and with regard to the ways in which it exhibits the character-
istic behavior of a particular category of persons, namely “doublers”—people
who avoid payment by passing through gates close behind an unwitting
accomplice.
Noticing problems and difficulties, potential threats to the routine oper-
ation of the station, is dependent upon the supervisor’s working knowledge
of the local environment and the ways in which particular scenes and locales
occasion and expose routine forms and patterns of conduct. Familiarity with the
local environment and its routine operation at certain times of the day and week
provides the supervisor with the ability to select and scrutinize CCTV images,
to notice and identify problems and difficulties. It also enables the supervisor
and colleagues to discover problems and difficulties that arise within the station
but beyond the scope of the camera and CCTV system; locales, corners, and
spaces within the station that are known colloquially as “off the world.”
Staff know that those who exploit passengers for nefarious purposes, to beg, steal,
sell drugs, and the like, are aware of the presence of cameras and surveillance of the
station. They go to some trouble to undertake their activities beyond the scope of the
system. In turn, supervisors are sensitive to the limitations of the field of view afforded
by the cameras, and their working knowledge of the station and the incidents that can
arise provide ways of scrutinizing CCTV images to detect problems and difficulties.
A principal resource in detecting problems that arise “off the world” is the conduct
and interaction of those that can be seen—the well-behaved passengers.
Consider the images in Figures 15.4, drawn from the CCTV of one of the
principal passageways at Leicester Square; they show passengers walking down
one of the passsageways.
Figure 15.4 drawings enhancing CCTV images of passengers walking along a

corridor in Leicester Square Station and their successive glances towards a person
begging (off camera) to the left
The supervisor notices the scene by virtue of the ways in which passengers
are navigating the passageway. As they walk toward the camera, they mo-
mentarily glance to their right, and one or two passengers extend their hand
to seemingly pass what appears to be small change to someone out of view.
A moment later the supervisor calls a station assistant to remove a beggar from
the passageway. The inaccessible obstacle, beyond the scope of the camera, is
noticed and rendered intelligible by virtue of the conduct of those who can be
seen. The supervisor’s familiarity with the characteristic navigation patterns
that arise within particular locales, coupled with an understanding of the type
of incident that commonly arises within certain areas of the station, provides
the resources with which to detect the incident and deploy an organizationally
relevant solution.
Familiarity with the station and the routine patterns of conduct and in-
cident that arise within particular regions, coupled with an understanding
of the characteristic features of particular actions, events, and incidents,
provides the resources through which an occasioned combination of CCTV
images can be selected and surveyed. A familiar and routine world, in-
cluding patterns of conduct and navigation, provides ways of looking at and
remaining sensitive to the images displayed on the screen and the world
beyond. Many of the incidents and events discovered through CCTV are
recognized unambiguously, an image or combination of images enabling
supervisors at a glance to identify a particular problem and to deploy an or-
ganizationally appropriate course of action. Other difficulties serve to pro-
voke an “investigation,” the search for an account, where a moment’s noticing
is often considered with regard to the prospective and retrospective course
of a (possible) action or activity; the sense and significance of the incident
or event is assembled with regard to what happens next and what might have
happened a moment before. So, for example, seeing smoke in the foyer can
have the supervisor following the smoke’s trail to find teenagers having a sur-
reptitious cigarette or joint; finding a break or gap in people leaving an es-
calator can enable the supervisor to discover that a passenger has collapsed
in the stairwell below; or noticing a number of waiting passengers looking
toward the entrance of a platform can lead the supervisor to discover that
a brawl has broken out in a passageway. Supervisors discover incidents by
virtue of noticing that passengers themselves have noticed “something”
within their immediate environment; indeed noticing noticings is a critical
resource through which supervisors discover and manage incidents that
arise both within and “off the world.”
The Interactional Foundations of Technology
Ethnomethodology provides the resources to consider the knowledge and

reasoning that enable the use of a technology and to examine how a system’s
use is inextricably embedded within organizational activity and practice.
For example, in contrast to the conventional idea of surveillance and matters
such as cognitive overload, monitoring and awareness, the use of CCTV is
highly selective and dependent upon the operators’ knowledge of the station,
its ecology, and its routine operation, including such matters as patterns of be-
havior and navigation, the temporal structure of certain processes and events,
and the characteristics of its routine problems and difficulties. Familiarity with
the ecology of the station and its routine operation enables operators to use
CCTV and associated tools and technologies to anticipate, discover, and iden-
tify problems to deploy an interactional organization in and through which
certain incidents and events are resolved or at least their impact, ameliorated.
The system, a complex arrangement of cameras, monitors, and switching gear,
is critical to preserving and re-establishing the order of the station. Its use is
dependent upon highly specialized ways of looking, seeing, and organizing—
of knowing an environment and its social and interactional characteristics and
organization.
There is a long-standing interest in both academia and industry in finding
new and distinctive approaches to the design of and requirements for new
technologies. It has been argued that ethnomethodology, with its emphasis
on the taken-for-granted, the practical knowledge and reasoning that en-
able the collaborative production of everyday activities, provides a distinc-
tive resource for informing design, reflecting on critical concepts, and in
some cases, identifying the requirements for complex systems (Anderson
1994; Blomberg and Karasti 2013; Crabtree 2003; Hughes et al. 1995; Randall,
Harper, and Rouncefield 2007). Putting to one side the debates as to how
ethnomethodology may contribute to design (Dourish 2006; Plowman,
Rogers, and Ramage 1995), in the case at hand we can consider the oppor-
tunities and the challenges that arise in using studies of everyday practice to
inform the design of technology, an image recognition system that enables the
automatic identification of events.
In PRISMATICA, for example, studies of practice demonstrated the impor-
tance of enabling the operators to customize the system with regard to the tem-
poral and geographical distribution of incidents and events that arise within
particular stations to maximize their opportunity to identify and manage routine
problems and difficulties. They also demonstrated the limitations of attempting

to identify particular events on the basis of the analysis of single images. For in-
stance, the operational definition of “overcrowding” routinely relies on a com-
bination of data, simultaneous images of various locations, platforms, entrance
foyers, and the like, coupled with information concerning the arrival and depar-
ture of trains. PRISMATICA informed the development of a number of proto-
type systems that were implemented, at least for a short time, at various stations
in London Underground, the most successful of which were applications that
enabled the identification of a small number of circumscribed incidents. More
importantly perhaps, the further development and application of these systems
were constrained not so much by the technical challenges in developing robust
solutions, but by virtue of the growing recognition, among transport operators,
that if successful, the systems could well identify substantial numbers of incidents
and events that hitherto had passed unnoticed. In consequence, the widespread
deployment of such systems throughout particular networks would have severe
resource implications and demand significant increases in staffing levels at sta-
tions. As a number of ethnomethodological studies demonstrate, informing de-
sign is just one among numerous considerations that bear upon the successful
development and deployment of new technologies.
The emergence of digital technologies over the past few decades has encour-
aged and facilitated the emergence of a substantial corpus of ethnomethodo-
logical and conversation analytic research that stands in marked contrast to
more traditional studies of technology found in the social and cognitive sci-
ences. It has driven analytic attention to the practices and practicalities that
enable the deployment of tools and technologies, while avoiding the abstract
generalization and quasi-deterministic modeling that have pervaded studies of
technology and its use. In prioritizing the situated character of practical action,
ethnomethodological studies have revealed the complex forms of practice and
agency that underpin how tools and technologies, objects, and artifacts feature
in everyday practical activity. These studies have provided the opportunity to
address issues, activities, and phenomena that have hitherto received little an-
alytic attention. They have also demanded methodological developments en-
abling the analysis of the complex forms of interaction and co-participation
critical to the accomplishment of practical action in contemporary organiza-
tional environments. They have highlighted and exposed the embodied and
embedded character of action and interaction and have provided new and
distinctive ways of undertaking studies of the workplace, the home, public
space, and the like. In short, this burgeoning corpus of research, inspired by
Garfinkel’s sociology, has powerfully demonstrated how the material, the dig-
ital, and the body feature in the concerted and collaborative production of
practical action.
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16
Occam’s Razor and the Challenges of
Generalization in Ethnomethodology
Iddo Tavory
Sociologists, like other scientists, have often been quick to espouse a simplified
version of “Occam’s razor”: the notion that the more parsimonious an explana-
tion, the better it probably is. Compared to this aesthetic, the ethnomethodolog-
ical sensibility provides a stark contrast: rather than simplifying and providing
a picture that is stripped from many of its specifics, the ethnomethodologist re-
mains with the precise and locally produced ways in which actors continuously
co-construct a working order. Rather than a neat razor-like “cut” into social life,
ethnomethodology exposes social life as messy and over-abundant; rather than
simplifying the world, it gains its power from remaining with the world’s com-
plexities and its ongoing emergence.
Beginning from this point of departure, the chapter makes two contributions.
First, as Garfinkel noted, a consistent application of ethnomethodology rejects
all forms of sociological generalization. This kind of consistency, however,
precludes any simple inclusion of ethnomethodology into the sociological canon.
As Garfinkel and Wieder (1992) wrote, ethnomethodology must remain an “al-
ternate technology.” To the extent that generalization is a part of the ethnometh-
odological tradition, it is in the ways it investigates actors’ own generalizations in
producing “ordinary, immortal society.” As I then argue, different ethnomethod-
ological programs such as conversation analysis (CA), institutional conversation
analysis, and ethnomethodology-inspired ethnography attempted to square this
circle—remaining close to ethnomethodology’s insights, while moving toward
a more generalizable account. Conversation analysis does so by suspending the
grounds for generalization while de facto claiming extremely wide generaliz-
ability (cf. Mondada, Chapter 11 in this volume); institutional CA does so by
focusing on recurring “institutional fingerprints” that mesh CA patterns with
institutionally specific structures (Drew and Heritage 1992) and local prag-
matics, and ethnomethodology-inspired ethnography does so by either focusing
on institutions, or generalizing what I call a space of legibility in analyzing their
observations.

GENERALIZATION IN ETHNOMETHODOLOGY 421
I conclude the piece by returning to Occam’s razor. I point out that the
common way of conceiving this principle—as a rule of parsimony—is a bastard-
ization of the original intent of the metaphor. Occam’s razor, sometimes called
“the nominalists’ razor,” was an attack against realist positions that claimed that
universals (which include generalizations) have an equal ontological status to
that of actual, specific, cases. Against this position, Occam’s razor was an admon-
ishment to keep the ontological playing field simple, and avoid “multiplying enti-
ties”: to only assume that actual, specific cases exist, and to treat generalizations
as constructions that have no real existence of their own. Seen in this light, eth-
nomethodology is in fact an extremely “simple” argument. Even if the descrip-
tion of any actual interaction becomes exceedingly complex, it makes fewer
assumptions about social life. As against positions that see social structures
as over “there” and beyond their specific emergence in action and interac-
tion, and against positions that see “culture” as relatively autonomous from its
instantiations, ethnomethodology describes a world in which only one “entity”
exists—people constantly creating their world and imbuing it with orderliness.
Theoretical Considerations
In a series of papers, Garfinkel (1988, 2002; Garfinkel and Wieder 1992) argued
that ethnomethodology and professional sociology were “incommensurable,
asymmetrically alternate technologies of social analysis.” In one of the most co-
gent exegeses of his position—a reaction to Jeffrey Alexander’s attempt to incor-
porate ethnomethodology into his micro-macro program—Garfinkel (1988)
stressed that ethnomethodology is concerned with what he calls Parsons’s
“plenum,” the everyday “haecceities” of action and interaction. That is, ethno-
methodology is committed to explain the “just-thisness” of action. In his expli-
cation, Garfinkel mentions eight reasons for the incommensurability between
the professional sociology program and ethnomethodology; reasons why, as he
maintains elsewhere (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992:180), “their reconciliation is
pointless.” Although not all the differences Garfinkel lists are relevant here, two
of them are of particular interest:
. . . the reported phenomena cannot be reduced by using the familiar reduction

procedures in the social science movement without losing those phenomena.
. . . the reported phenomena are only inspectably the case. They are unavail-
able to the arts of designing and interpreting definitions, metaphors, models,
constructions, types, or ideals. They cannot be recovered by attempts no matter
how thoughtful, to specify an examinable practice by detailing a generality.
(Garfinkel 1988:108, emphasis added)
These, in fact, are not really two reasons; this is a general statement and its prac-
tical specification. To re-cast his argument, the tension between ethnomethod-
ology and professional sociology is that of the tension between generalization
and reduction, as against the minute description of the local construction of
“immortal-ordinary-society.” For generalization, ipso facto, is an attempt to
shave off aspects of the ongoing local construction of the social world. It doesn’t
lose information by accident, but by design. Reduction lies at the heart of gen-
eralization: giving up on some data and simplifying a detail-filled social world
so that different cases can be described in terms of properties that transcend the
particular instance. The local specificity of every case as-such must be reduced.
It is this incommensurability that can be thought of in terms of the popu-
larized notion of Occam’s razor, understood as “a criterion for privileging one
theory over another. When two different theoretical interpretations seem equally
successful in accounting for variation or change, the preferable explanation is the
one that is the most simple” (Powers 2010:70). In other words, the assumption is
that the simpler explanation is usually the right one.
And, in any collection of cases, it seems simpler to generalize. The act of gen-
eralization eliminates aspects of the situation that make particular situations
precisely what they are, with all their specific histories, their exigencies and idi-
osyncrasies. Thus, even complex generalizations are far simpler than an attempt
to trace the ongoing production of the social world’s orderliness (Garfinkel 1967,
2002) as it is constructed anew in each case, in the contextuality of people’s ori-
entation, and to assume that this work is precarious and ongoing. Indeed, when
newcomers are introduced to ethnomethodology, one of the striking points of
both attraction and aversion is how complicated the everyday world becomes.
To take one example, Pollner’s (1987) “mundane reason” is one of the most
compelling examples of this ethnomethodological transformation of the world.
Pollner’s core argument is that the assumption that we inhabit a common world
needs to be constructed and reconstructed in action and interaction. Rather
than a given, that sense of a common world is an ongoing achievement produced
by way of its “ethnomethods,” or situated members’ practices. Looking at traffic
courts as a particularly illustrative setting—where actors’ practical challenges
force them to make explicit what is implicit in other situations—Pollner shows
how the co-inhabiting of reality is done and re-done. When parties in court are
arguing about whether the defendant, for example, drove through a red light—
or did not—they may go out of their way to explain how the two versions of re-
ality (“what actually happened” in a case) align. Perhaps the driver couldn’t see
the light because of a tree blocking his view? Or because the sun was in his eyes?
As Pollner shows, beyond the specificities of the case, parties defend a much
more basic assumption—that there is one true reality that they both inhabit;
that the two versions of reality they submit to court are commensurable. Like
Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) description of the efficacy of witchcraft among the

Azande, the experience of co-inhabiting a world in common must be worked
on, and is often quite fragile, even if actors are often not aware of such work and
its fragility.
Pollner’s painstaking description of what transpires in traffic courts is any-
thing but simple or parsimonious. It is only with some intellectual and meth-
odological effort that we detach ourselves from the seeming simplicity of the
common-sense or natural attitude. And yet, as Pollner’s work and the entire eth-
nomethodological corpus shows, there is indeed something to analyze. Once we
attend to the ways in which people actually enact these accomplishments, they
seem less and less mundane. As against the slicing of social life through general-
ization, ethnomethodology is interested precisely with the ongoing ordering in
the “plenum” of the human social condition. As opposed to the neat paring of the
razor, ethnomethodology tries to keep the patient intact, and trace how social
order is achieved in its specificity and detail, in a way that seems to ramify, rather
than simplify, what the bases of social order in ordinary society consist of. As
Garfinkel (1996:6) points out, the question is always “What more?,” a question
that drives the ethnomethodology corpus, and that rejects any razor-like move
to reduce our understandings by way of theoretically—or empirically derived
propositions.
As such, ethnomethodology eschews both kinds of generalizations that
“professional sociologists” usually construct. First, it rejects what we can think
of as “empirical extensions”: that a case can be considered as a synecdoche of
a larger pattern in the social world. As reconstructions of order-as-practices
are inherently specific, much of the work of sociology falls to the side in one
swipe. Second, Garfinkel’s point is an even more incisive critique of what we can
think of as “theory-of-action-based” generalizations: the assumption that we
can map the way that people in the social world generalize their worlds, and,
as sociologists, treat their generalizations as a starting point for empirical anal-
ysis. Indeed, it is this Parsonsian rule/norm-based generalization of action that
Garfinkel reacted to initially. Garfinkel’s critique of the rule/norm-based ap-
proach to the social world is well known (see, e.g., Heritage 1984: Chapter 5).
Rather than assuming that a “norm” is always there in potentia, Garfinkel argued
that order is constructed within the situation, with just the resources at hand.
As Heritage and Clayman (2010:21) put it, like the figures of the Beatles in
Yellow Submarine, the social order is constantly enacted, as “persons are con-
tinuously creating, maintaining, or altering the social circumstances in which
they are placed.” The same critique, however, would preclude the facile use of
notions such as Bourdieu’s “habitus,” as well as positions that give causal primacy
to “culture” or “discourse.” In other words, any theory that posits that actors’ own
forms of generalization can be assumed to operate as the explanans for human
behavior—even if these generalizations are understood as dispositions rather

than the Parsonian “norms and values”—is suspect.
Staying close to the situation at hand, we can neither assume that it tells us
something about a general patterning of meaning in the world (empirical ex-
tension), nor that actors’ practices are derived by inherent “ready- made”
generalizations in the shape of norms, “habitus,” or what have you. As Rawls
(2002) writes in her preface to Garfinkel’s Durkheim’s Aphorism:
Instead of constructing models that approximate social orders, the EM ana-

lyst needs to discover how intelligible patterns of behavior are actually being
constructed and negotiated on the spot. This is not something that can be done
once for all cases. Every situation has different patterns of order that are re-
quired for the coherence of action within that situation. (2002:30)
This also means that the incommensurability between the popularized rule of
parsimony and Garfinkel’s program is not a matter of perspectival change. As
such, the distinctions made by ethnomethodology are quite different from other
apparent dichotomies in sociological work: distinctions between “emic” and
“etic” categories, based on the point of view of the “native” as opposed to that
of the sociologist (Pike 1967); between “categories of practice” that actors use
to explain their actions, and “categories of analysis” that are used by researchers
(Brubaker 2013); or, “first person” vs. “third person” points of view, based on
the difference between categories emerging from the actors’ own experience as
opposed to experientially distant explanations that don’t take these experiences
into account (Martin 2011). Although there are subtle differences among these
distinctions, these are all puzzles of perspective. The question within each dis-
tinction is always “whose categories?,” “whose experience?” Categories of prac-
tice, emic categories, and the first-person point of view are all based on the way
in which the people we study perceive or experience the world. On the other side
of this divide, categories of analysis, etic categories, and the third-person point of
view are the picture of the world from the analyst’s position.
The distinction drawn by Garfinkel between “professional sociology” and
the ethnomethodological stance is based upon an altogether different logic.
Although it is closer to emic, first-person sensibilities, ethnomethodology
suggests that theorizing based upon perspective misses its mark. Generalizing
from either the point of view of the researched, or from that of the researcher,
has the same pitfalls. Since actors’ own categories are often glosses on the on-
going work of sustaining and constructing their world, we must treat actors’
generalizations with much the same suspicion as we treat those of the profes-
sional sociologist.
The only way in which generalizations work their way into ethnomethod-
ology, then, is when an investigator analyzes the ways in which actors themselves
see their own action through the lenses of generalization. That is, ethnomethod-
ology, in a by now familiar move, turns resources—such as generalization—into
topics (Zimmerman and Pollner 1970). Rather than generalization being some-
thing of a resource for theorists who work to shave off contingencies of action
from the social patterns they find, ethnomethodologists study how actors con-
struct the generalized meaning of their own actions as these unfold.
Perhaps the best formulation of this ethnomethodological engagement with
generalization is the notion of the social as “immortal-ordinary society” (see
Garfinkel 1996:10; Rawls 1996). Borrowed from Durkheim, although he does
with it something quite different, the notion of society as “immortal” is best sum-
marized by Garfinkel (1996) in the following note:
Immortal is used to speak of human jobs as of which local members, being in

the midst of organizational things, know, of just these organizational things
they are in the midst of, that it preceded them and will be there after they
leave. It is a metaphor for the great recurrences of ordinary society, staffed,
provided for, produced, observed and observable, locally and accountably in
and as of an “assemblage of haeccieities.” EM places heavy emphasis on “im-
mortal.” It is a recurrent theme in the EM catalog and a source of its topics.
(1996:10–11)
Seen from this angle, then, to the degree that generalizations are of concern to
ethnomethodology, they are generalizations made by actors, as they go about
living their lives. In the midst of everyday conduct, actors construe their world
as immortal, a world that “preceded them and will be there after they leave.” It is
actors who construct or achieve the ways in which their world transcends their
own situated experience.
The incommensurable approaches to generalization in ordinary social theory
as compared with ethnomethodology raise a practical challenge for the ethno-
methodological program. For, with few exceptions, most ethnomethodology
practitioners are enmeshed in multiple communities of inquiry that incite them
to make broader generalizations. That is, they are pressured by their peers, as by
reviewers of the journals they publish in, to show how their findings do more
than show, for yet another case, that the world is constructed in the making. The
next section addresses this predicament—asking whether is it possible to pro-
duce something like generalization, while being enmeshed in a form of inquiry
that explicitly rejected or avoided traditional approaches to making broad prop-
ositions about how social life works.
Generalizations and Ethnomethodologies
As many have pointed out (e.g., Maynard and Clayman 1991), there are varieties
of “doing ethnomethodology,” as ethnomethodology and ethnomethodology-
inspired disciplines have emerged through the past decades. These, in turn, take
different stances regarding the question of generalization. Earlier, I have pro-
vided what I see as Garfinkel’s position, at least as it is presented in the papers
in which he directly confronted the relation between professional sociology
(or “formal analysis”) and ethnomethodology. There are, however, other ways
to approach the relation between the observable and instructable locally pro-
duced ordering of the world and the challenges of generalization. As these are
important in thinking about how to practically organize ethnomethodology-in-
spired possible research agendas, I point toward three such options—ordinary
talk-
in-
interaction (CA), institutional CA, and ethnomethodology- inspired
ethnography.1
Perhaps the most influential ethnomethodology-inspired subdiscipline is con-

versation analysis (CA).2 Although drawing heavily on other resources, notably
on the work of Erving Goffman, CA’s stress on the local production of social ac-
tion, and its insistence on detailing the minute work involved in the actual emer-
gence of a working order abundantly show its debt to Garfinkel’s work.
And yet, CA deals with, and aims at, generalization. In Sacks’s (1984:21)
“Notes on Methodology,” he stresses the importance of the specificity of any ob-
servation, yet begins with the assertion that the order found by CA is that of “sin-
gular occurrences that are generalizable in intuitively nonapparent ways.” And,
as Schegloff (2007) notes in his primer on sequence organization:
Across all the different kinds of actions which people do through talk, are there
any sorts of general patterns or structures which they use (and which we can
describe) to co-produce and track an orderly stretch of talk or other conduct in
which some course of action gets initiated, worked through, and brought to a
closure? (2007:3, emphasis added)
CA, then, is the search for general patterns of talk-in-interaction, as these emerge
in participants’ own ways for assembling actions.
But how are these generalizations to be defended? In this regard, CA takes an
empirical stance, which can be seen most clearly in CA’s arguments against the-
oretical specifications of the conversational order. Schegloff critiques structural
linguistics (similar to his approach to Parsons, e.g., Schegloff 1991) for assuming
generalized structures, rather than tracing their emergence in interaction. And
yet, it is important to note that this critique is not the same as Garfinkel’s: it is
not the possibility of generalization, but analytic presuppositions positing its
structures that Schegloff (2007) engages. Generalizations need to be empirically
discovered and theoretically open to revision based on ongoing research. Like
any rigorous endeavor, there is an inherent openness to generalization, condi-
tioned on the availability of revision in the event that new data problematizes
previous generalizations.
CA is cagey, however, about the theoretical grounding of such generalization.
In certain places, the architects of CA note that the structures of talk emerge
from the exigencies of communication, and the ongoing attempt to understand
“why that now?” (Sacks and Schegloff 1973), which can be safely assumed to
be a question with which actors are continuously engaged. This pragmatist
assumption of ongoing “problem-solving” as an ever-relevant concern is fur-
ther buttressed by drawing from phenomenological notions that actors are
attempting to construct, sustain, and defend intersubjectivity in interaction
(Heritage 1984; Schegloff 1992).3
However, as much as CA addresses intersubjectivity as an ongoing achieve-
ment, it is quite distant from Garfinkel’s remarks on the relationship between
ethnomethodology and professional sociology. As Schegloff (1991) wrote re-
garding the relationship between generalizations of social structures and CA,
one concern is
. . . the balance between the focus on social structure and the focus on conversa-
tional structure in studying talk-in-interaction. These two thematic focuses (we
would like to think) are potentially complementary. (1991:57)
Rather than incommensurability of generalized structures and the local produc-

tion of social order, the challenges that Schegloff (e.g., 1991) addresses in cen-
tral publications on this topic are different: to ensure that considerations and
descriptions regarding social structure do not overshadow the particularities
of the interaction order; to show how two kinds of structure—the sociological
and the interactional—possibly interact. As such, the logic of this argument is
reminiscent of Goffman’s (1983) “interaction order,” with its emphasis on the au-
tonomy of interactional structures and their importance as a sui generis logic of
organization (see also Rawls 1987). And, although powerful, this position is dif-
ferent from Garfinkel’s take on the incommensurability between ethnomethodo-
logical and formal sociological generalizations.
A particularly telling instance that showcases the relation between the local
construction of order and generalization can be seen in Schegloff ’s (1993)
warnings regarding the possibility of quantification in CA. Wary of the forms

of generalization that quantification gives rise to, Schegloff (1993) notes that the
translation of the ongoing production of orderly interaction into measurable
units tends to shift the analysis from forms of action into counting occurrences
of specific words or conversational gestures without regard to the context of
their production. He calls this the “denominator” problem. It makes little sense
to ask, “how often do people laugh?,” he notes, if we do not know how often
there was an “opening” for such laughter in interaction—something to respond
to. To ask how often people laugh (for example, per minute) as a measure of
sociability ignores how laughter needs to be related to the actual conduct with
which it co-occurs. The in-depth single case analysis is still necessary at any
given point.
Yet, again, this does not mean that generalizability is impossible, even in its
quantified form. Rather, the problem is that talk-in-interaction includes a large
range of actions that can be “done” in different ways with different effects, and
is co-organized interactionally in contingent and creative ways. It is not quan-
tification per se, much less generalizability, that Schegloff is cautioning against,
but the flattening of talk into markers rather than engaging full-bore analysis
of what Garfinkel called indexical expressions—the embeddedness of talk in its
temporal, spatial, and other environments. As he wraps up his article, Schegloff
(1993:117) notes that it may turn out that there is no warrant for quantification
in CA precisely because the organization of conduct is always achieved in just-
this-case—“on the level of the singular occurrence only.” But, he notes, “I do not
believe that this conclusion is warranted.”
In place of incommensurability between single-case analysis and quantifica-
tion, the points Schegloff (1993:118) raises are “concerns to be addressed.” If we
understand enough about the actions we analyze, and if we find a way to get at the
action rather than at markers of presupposed or predefined features, then we can
indeed use them as a “set” and have little reason to avoid quantification. There is
nothing fundamentally wrong with generalization. It simply needs to be done
with extreme care, and to be grounded in empirical materials and participants’
orientations rather than in theoretical presumptions and stipulations.
Institutional Conversation Analysis
The approach to generalization developed within talk-in-interaction has deeply

affected the way in which later conversation analytic researchers pursued their
work. And yet, in the move between “naturally occurring” talk-in-interaction
and institutional CA, the stance concerning generalization is further developed,
making a decisive step toward the heart of sociological inquiry.
As Drew and Heritage (1992) and Heritage (2004) put it, the differences be-
tween CA and institutional talk can be organized around the following three
considerations. First, the goal of interaction analyzed in institutional CA is more
narrowly defined. In regular talk-in-interaction, one can assume that intersub-
jectivity, and the pragmatics of “why that now” are ever present locally. In insti-
tutional talk, however, there are other, institutionally organized, goals. One goes
to the doctor and expects to get a diagnosis; one goes to, or participates in, court
proceedings (Atkinson and Drew 1979; Maynard 1984) and expects specific
outcomes. Second, institutions place constraints on what can, and cannot, be
done (a conversation about shopping would usually be out of place in the doctor’s
office). Third, talk will be understood and shaped based on these assumed
goals and constraints (see also Arminen 2005). Importantly, these differences
mean that specific identities and goals are already anticipated in institutional talk
(see also Zimmerman 1998). Rather than simply asking “why that now?” as does
regular talk-in-interaction, the question may be, in effect, “why that now, for the
ongoing construction of these institutional concerns?”
This institutional move does not mean that we return to a scripted notion
of the social. Even the most seemingly scripted of institutional moments is an
ongoing construction, and actors can (and do) weave in and out of their insti-
tutional identities and goals in interaction. Interactions, also, quite often, fail
(see, e.g., Whalen, Zimmerman, and Whalen 1988). Although we can talk about
“institutional fingerprints” (Drew and Heritage 1992; Heritage and Greatbatch
1991), the institution is still being constructed turn-by-turn in interaction. And
yet, institutional CA is based on a doubling of the epistemological grounds. On
the one hand, we look for the ongoing co-construction of the institution in inter-
action; on the other hand, we assume that the primary context of interaction is
that of institutionally defined goals and identities. In the first moment we remain
in the realm of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology; in the second moment the ana-
lyst steers closer to interactional assumptions regarding the ways in which insti-
tutional contexts, as exhibited procedurally in participants’ talk and embodied
conduct (Schegloff 1987), can shape interaction by requiring or allowing some
actions, foreclosing others, and thereby creating pragmatic constraints (see
Rock 1979).
Methodologically speaking, analysts discern patterns and generalizations
from a collection of cases. The here-and-now and the problems at hand have
unique aspects and auspices, but the interactional resources by which people
make sense and cooperate for institutional ends are considered to be recur-
rent. Situations are reproduced by institutional actors who face similar interac-
tional challenges in specific settings, and as aspects of the interaction become
incorporated into nonhumans that produce their own sets of pressures. Thus,
for example, race emerges as relevant for intelligible action in the case of a 911
emergency call whether or not the caller mobilized race in their initial descrip-
tion of troubles, as the need to fill standardized forms and protocols shapes the
interaction (Kameo and Whalen 2015).
Although couched in a different methodology and sensibility to the ongoing
production of the situation, however, the mode of generalization here is very
close to certain interactionist versions of “professional sociology,” especially
where institutional CA becomes more pointedly applied. Thus, to take a well-
known example of such applied institutional CA, Heritage et al. (2007) show
how the specific ways in which doctors construct their questions in the medical
interview matter for the responses they receive. As the authors show, using the
word “any” (as in the question “do you have any more problems . . . ?”) will tend
to generate a negative response; using the word “some” tends to generate more
medical concerns. As the interaction is co-constructed in situ, the word “any”
tends to cue the other interactant to sustain the smoothness of the interaction
by replying in the negative and moving toward closing the interview. Thus, when
doctors changed their question construction to ask “do you have some other
concerns . . . ?” patients tend to raise medical matters that they brought to the in-
terview but which the word “any” discourages from articulating.
In terms of generalization, a few things may be noted here. First, the article
not only makes a generalization about the cases it has analyzed, but makes both a
predictive and a prescriptive generalization. If doctors want patients to tell them
of their woes, they should avoid the word “any” since it tends to be no-preferring,
whereas “some” tends to be yes-preferring. In order to assess these tendencies, the
paper uses quantification—including crucially the average number of concerns
raised in relation to question design. Whereas Schegloff had been uncomfortable
with the quantification of talk-in-interaction, Heritage et al. base their analysis
on such quantification (see also Maynard, Freese, and Schaeffer 2010; Schaeffer
et al. 2013; Stivers and Majid 2007).
At least in these applied studies, institutional CA moves farther from the
ethnomethodological position that avoids generalization because of the “just-
thisness” of everyday life, as well as classic CA’s unease with quantification.
The assumptions regarding recurring institutional pragmatics, as these are
superimposed on conversational structures, allow institutional CA to construct
wider generalizations, even as the data and mode of analysis still draw inspira-
tion from ethnomethodology, and its mode of analysis from classical CA.
Ethnomethodology-Inspired Ethnography
While ethnomethodology has been extremely influential in a variety of emerging

disciplines—from work studies to studies of science and technology—its influence
on the wider sociological community has often been more elusive. And whereas
there are different reasons for this relative lack of engagement (e.g., simple igno-
rance, ethnomethodology’s sharp rhetorical self-positioning, as well as the opacity
of Garfinkel’s writing), one key reason may be ethnomethodology’s rejection of gen-
eralization on behalf of capturing the “just-thisness” of episodes in everyday life. In
a discipline that has moved toward increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques
and aspirations, qualitative researchers often feel the need to prove their worth by
producing both empirical and theoretical generalizations (see, e.g., Glaser and
Strauss 1967; Tavory and Timmermans 2014). As research students quickly learn,
the ongoing question that haunts qualitative sociologists is “what is this a case of?”
(Becker 2014; Becker and Ragin 1992), a question that assumes the movement from
one context to another as an important aspect of the research project.
At least within academic sociology in the United States, ethnography thus
seems to have relatively little contact with ethnomethodology. And yet, with
its attention to the details of everyday life and the Chicago School focus on
the ongoing construction of meaning, it seems that pragmatist-inspired inter-
actional ethnography and ethnomethodology are kindred projects (see also
Emirbayer and Maynard 2011). If there is a “natural” disciplinary space for
ethnomethodology to take root in the field of sociology, it may be ethnog-
raphy. After all, despite recognizing the deep theoretical differences between
the positions, Pollner and Emerson (2001:118) noted somewhat optimistically
that “the once pronounced differences [between ethnomethodology and eth-
nography] may be dissolving into an integrated methodological sensibility.”
While such an integrated sensibility seems to still be indistinctly hovering
in the distance, some lines of argument constructed by ethnomethodology-in-
spired ethnographers—and some ways of attempting to reconcile the razor of
generalizations with the details of locally constructed order—can be glimpsed.
In the following I provide examples of two such possibilities. First, following
writers such as Dorothy Smith (e.g., 1987), as well as being inspired by talk-in-
interaction, ethnomethodology-inspired ethnographers can move between local
construction and recurrent institutional affordances and pressures. Thus, some-
what as in institutional CA, ethnographers can trace institutional fingerprints,
relying on the local construction of order, sometimes even poaching CA
techniques. Second, ethnographers can treat the constructions of meaning
as local accomplishments, while generalizing what we may term the field site’s
“space of legibility.” This is the idea that within specific social worlds, subjects
find some actions to be more easily and commonly accountable than others. For
subjects, such actions emerge again and again as recognizably “another instance
of x.” Thus, when ethnographers encounter such moments again and again,
they can assume that subjects’ work to make sense of the specific is immediately
shared and obvious—or, in other words, “legible.”
In each case, rather than attempting an extensive literature review, I provide an

example of such ethnographic work. I do so both as a way to showcase possible
forms of ethnomethodology-inspired ethnography, but also, more programmat-
ically, to suggest that ethnomethodology is an analytically powerful way to gain
traction on the kinds of questions that ethnographers are invested in.
Institutional Fingerprints
Much like the institutional CA’s grounding of generalization in the interac-
tion between local constructions and institutional pragmatics and pressures,
writers such as Smith (e.g., 1987) have attempted to infuse ethnomethodology
with a more structural appreciation of power. Thus, Smith’s “Institutional
Ethnography” oscillates between an ethnomethodology-inspired account and a
Marxist-feminist critique of institutional life. Although Smith assumes a macro-
context within which action takes place, her work shows how—within these
parameters—actors constantly recreate their world.
To take one recent example of an ethnography that is explicitly indebted to
Smith, Goodman (2008) studied the ways in which racialization occurred in the
context of prisoner intake. As officers process new inmates and fill in official doc-
umentation, they use the pre-given rubric of “race” in the form as a way to de-
termine where to put the inmates (see also Kameo and Whalen 2015). Thus, in
this setting, ethnicity becomes omni-relevant as a way to organize people’s lives.
See the following conversation, taking place in an inmate-processing center in
a California prison that Goodman calls “Central.” As they arrive, the inmates
are unshackled, and processed by an officer, with other officers and incoming
inmates in close proximity (Goodman 2008:759):
Officer: Race?
Inmate: Portuguese.
Officer: Portuguese? [pause] You mean White?
Inmate: Nah, I’m Portuguese, not White.
Officer: Sure, but who do you house with?
Inmate: Usually with the “Others.”
Officer: We don’t fuck with that here. It’s just Black, White, or Hispanic.
Inmate: Well, I’m Portuguese.
Second officer, looking on the whole time: Put him with the Negros, then
[“Negro” pronounced in Spanish].
Inmate: What?!
Second officer: Oh, now you’re serious, huh. So you want to house with the
Whites, do you?
Inmate: Fine, with the Whites.
Officer: OK, with the Whites it is.
The attempt to break the racial typology is a problem both of abstract classifi-
cation and practical work. The officers need to place the inmate in a category,
but his choice of an alternative classification (apparently allowed in other states)
doesn’t fit the Black/White/Hispanic options on the forms they fill, causing an
ongoing practical problem. If there is no “other” category, where does the in-
mate fit? The officers, as the excerpt shows, proceed to solve this problem first by
giving the inmate the “right” options he can choose from (disabusing him of the
category of “other”), and then by threatening to house him with black inmates, in
a move that they correctly assume would jolt him into submission.
Through this example of a “bumpy” interaction, as well as other, smoother,
moments of racial classification, Goodman (2008) documents how officers
achieve not only regularities in categorization but also patterns of segregation
in prisons. Officers must attend to the physical form as, under pressures of time,
they process the inmates and place them in particular cells. When they encounter
unexpected resistance, they can utilize their institutional power, manifested
here in the threat to house the inmate “with the Negros,” and the dismissal of
the category of “other.” And although Goodman does not use CA, this form of
ethnographic inquiry—like institutional talk-in-interaction—can potentially
reveal, through the analysis of identifying detail and their ordered regularities,
the institutional fingerprints of prison intake (see also Brubaker et al. 2006;
Duneier 1999). Such inquiry may appear to be a type of “formal analysis,” in-
sofar as it goes some ways to explain how racialization in California prisons has
become an entrenched feature of the penal system. However, it is based on the
close analysis of both talk and the required use of placement documents as they
infuse the talk and social interactions between officers and inmates.
Generalizing Ethnographic Legibility

The preceding case, somewhat like some classic institutional talk-in-interac-
tion—links the local and interactional emergence of meanings to institutional
arrangements and pressures.4 Such work may thus provide a useful bridge be-
tween ethnography and ethnomethodology. Although the generalizations that
the ethnographers land on may be too sweeping for the taste of many ethno-
methodology/CA practitioners, the logic of generalization should be quite fa-
miliar. The balance of local construction and patterned relations is achieved
by sidelining Garfinkel’s bracketing of structure when it comes to institutional
constraints and goals. As such, to mix metaphors, it relies on regular leaps of
faith conducted by the ethnographer—one moment the world emerges in inter-
action, in the next moment the goals, power differentials, identities, and prag-
matics are already set.
A complementary way to move between generalization and local construc-
tion is to avoid the generalization of structures, while allowing generalization
of actors’ assumptions of legibility—the kinds of actions that they assume that

others in the field are easily able to interpret. That is, when ethnographers see
subjects acting a certain way, or hear “how it is” in their social world, they should
be suspicious of the content of informants’ claims—folk generalizations are still
generalizations (see also Pollner and Emerson 2001). However, rather than only
seeing such claims as local and situation-bound constructions of order, they treat
the generalization as a “move” that actors make—one designed to be understood,
and thus telling the ethnographer something about what actors see as legible in a
particular social world.
The paradigmatic example of this kind of research is Wieder’s (1974) dis-
cussion of “the code” in a halfway house. Conducting an ethnography of the
inhabitants of a halfway house, Wieder constantly encountered references to
“the convict code” as a way to organize and explain action. This code was used
to justify different actions, to ignore Wieder himself, or to construct solidarity
against real or imagined moments of “snitching.” And yet, this “code,” as Wieder
stresses, was not merely a set of rules. Rather, it was a way of making sense of the
world as it unfolds. It was reinvented and remade in action. Tracing the way that
people use “the code” thus ends up teaching the reader something quite impor-
tant about the limit of rule/norm-based sociological inquiry—there is no code
“out there,” but rather a constant ordering of the social world.
And yet, reading about how participants invoked the code also tells the reader
something about the halfway house itself. For, although the code means different
things as it is situationally evoked, it also provides the reader a way to begin to
understand the kinds of moves that the inhabitants of the halfway house ex-
pect other inhabitants to be able to make sense of. Whether or not talking to
the researcher will or will not be understood as snitching, for example, it is im-
portant that the residents anticipated that other residents would understand
conversations with outsiders as “dangerous”; that the halfway house is “the kind
of place” where such anticipations made sense. And, whether or not residents
were “right” or “wrong,” readers come to realize that these considerations make
sense in this social world, where they wouldn’t in others.
To exemplify this mode of tacking between local constructions of order
and the assumptions of legibility made by subjects, I would like to bring an
example of my own work (Tavory 2016). Conducting an ethnography of a
Jewish-Orthodox neighborhood in Los Angeles, I was sitting at a small house
with Hasidic Orthodox friends, when I saw their two toddlers playing with the
magnetic pencil case shown in Figure 16.1.
The pencil case featured Disney’s “Snow White and the Prince.” However,
the characters were transformed. The metal pencil case came with pieces
of magnetic clothing that children could use to dress the figures, and the
Figure 16.1 “The Eidel Princess and the Ben Torah”

Source: picture by author
toddler’s mother had added her own magnetic accoutrements, cutting them,
as she later told me, out of an old refrigerator magnet she had. Adding these
new magnets, she changed “Snow White” into “the Eidel Princess” (the modest
Princess), and the Prince into the “Ben Torah” (the Torah boy). The two chil-
dren, who were too young to read the names of the characters, were calling
them by these new names. When I asked the mother about the reworked toy,
she answered that she did not want her children to tell others about playing
with “Snow White”—not because there was anything wrong with the toy or
the images, she said, but because if they used these names, others might think
that they knew who and what “Snow White and the Prince” were, implying
that they have seen the movie, and thus have transgressed into the secular
world of entertainment.
How then to analyze such a moment? A culturalist approach may latch on
to the details provided by an informant about a social world as providing a
kind of “thick description” of the scene. The informant provides a general-
ization about the Orthodox social world as one in which members will be
judged if their children know “profane knowledge,” which the ethnogra-
pher loyally reproduces. But another way to think about this episode is more
ethnomethodology-inspired, more like Wieder’s notion of the “code.” Rather
than assuming that he now knows what the Orthodox “norm” is, the re-
searcher assumes that—with just the resources at hand, at just this moment—
subjects construct an account that they expect others in the neighborhood
would understand.
And yet, thinking about this episode as a local production does not mean
that it doesn’t tell us something generalizable about the field. Like “the code,”
we can assume that the episode is a legible one. Of course, this does not mean
that all Orthodox people sustain their image in the same way (as it turns out,
they don’t), or that they see the same items as equally defiling (they don’t), or
even that the same items are always considered defiling by the same people.
And yet, whereas the ethnographer cannot argue that the specific claims his
interlocutor makes are right in the sense of transparently telling us “what the
world is like,” they tell us something important about the kinds of arguments
that subjects expect that others in their social world would immediately make
sense of. This, in turn, may reveal quite a lot about the given social world—
one where secular leisure culture is seen by some members as problematic
enough to need justification; where people may expect others to read their own
patterns of religious conduct from their children’s behavior; where tinkering
with secular leisure-forms to produce religious forms is possible.
Such arguments about the Orthodox world, although couched in the language
of legibility, still form generalizations about the social world the ethnographer
studies—that secular leisure culture needs to be managed, and that private con-
sumption of such leisure is anticipated by actors to require translation into reli-
gious terms for others in the community. As such, the researcher needs to check
them against other cases (perhaps this move is only legible for this actor? At this
time? Perhaps others would see this mother as completely mad?). Yet, the pro-
cess through which the researcher makes these generalizations, as well as their
nature, is still indebted to ethnomethodology. While it is a leap into generaliza-
tion, such an analysis does not reduce indexical expressions to instantiations of
a general rule, norm, or habit, but uses such moments to study what actors can
expect to make sense in their world.
Back to Occam’s Razor, by Way of Conclusions
This chapter began with an image of Occam’s razor as a rule of parsimony. This
popular rendition of the razor leads one to accept the simplest analytic descrip-
tion or theory of action (see, e.g., Biggs 2009). In these terms, ethnomethodology
is probably the farthest away one can be from the neat cut of a razor. The messi-
ness of action and the ongoing construction of order, I have suggested, is far from
simple. Ethnomethodology’s effectiveness as social theory and inquiry has little
to do with that form of neatness.
But as I noted earlier, the usual understanding of Occam’s razor itself is quite
far from its original meaning. Occam’s razor—the pithy warning that “entities
should not be multiplied beyond necessity”—was constructed to answer a very
different challenge (Ariew 1976). Rather than a rule of scientific parsimony, it was
an ontological position in the struggle between realism and nominalism. Indeed,
Occam’s razor is sometimes referred to, in this context, as “the nominalists’
razor.” The context was a debate in medieval philosophy about the ontological
status of universals—whether things such as “redness” or “bigness” (or “class” for
this matter) that seem to be attributes of different particular observations have
some kind of ontological status, or whether they are simply words (hence “nomi-
nalism”) that gloss over the particularities of specific cases, and are devoid of any
reality of their own. Occam’s razor was an attempt to shore up nominalism, and
resist our impulse to assume that collective terms exist beyond their enactment.
In emphasizing the “just thisness” of the world, Garfinkel was waging a sim-
ilar battle with generalizations that are assumed to be a substance in their own
right, now in the shape of “norms,” “values,” or “rules.” And, seen from this angle,
the relationship between ethnomethodology and Occam’s razor radically shifts.
Ethnomethodology’s analyses may be painstaking, and may be exceedingly
complex in any given case. But as a position, ethnomethodology is ontologically
minimalist. It makes fewer, not more, assumptions about the kinds of things
there are in the social world.
Although the complexity of any given analysis seems to belie this assertion, in
terms of social ontology, ethnomethodology is exceedingly simple. Both meth-
odologically and theoretically, ethnomethodology rejects assertions such as that
there are different “spheres” of life, that culture and interaction are two relatively
autonomous environments of action, or that generalizations such as “class” and
“social structure” exist beyond their specific instantiations. Rather than a world
populated by people, values, codes, and culture, the world that ethnomethod-
ology depicts is of people co-constructing a working order—“ordinary, immortal
society”—moment by moment.
Where does this leave us? Clarifying the relationship between generalization
and ethnomethodology’s various projects does not make our lives as practicing
sociologists any easier. If we are to make claims that go beyond the ongoing,
in situ, construction of the world, we end up with assumptions that Garfinkel
attempted to banish. And yet, even for those of us who still feel the urge to
generalize, ethnomethodology forces us to realize the intellectual shortcuts,
assumptions, and presumptions that we make in generalization to remind us
that we are “multiplying entities.” And, if we remain attentive to the price we pay
for generalizations in the form of the glosses and assumptions that we introduce,
we may at least strive to ask ourselves how defensible these are.
Finally, it is not only that ethnomethodology and professional sociology
are incommensurable, but that, as Garfinkel came to see, they were “alternate
Janus faces of accountability as the objective reality of social facts.” (Garfinkel
2002:103). If we are to understand the myriad ways through which social life
goes on, we may have to constantly move between the two faces of Janus. For at
the end:
The prize is one for both technologies, that ties both technologies, and that nei-
ther technology can have by itself. It ties them in that they are incommensu-
rable alternates. To win the prize not only requires the competence of both, but
each requires the competence of the other for itself. (Garfinkel 2002:103–4)
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17
Ethnomethodology and
Atypical Interaction
The Case of Autism
Douglas W. Maynard and Jason J. Turowetz
A venerable definition of ethnomethodology is that it comprises the study of

common-sense knowledge—the seen but “unnoticed” assumptions about how
the world should work, with its “life as usual character” (Garfinkel 1967:37), and
undergirded by a sense of trust and reciprocity that Schutz (1962) called the at-
titude of daily life (ADL). The ADL consists of a set of background expectancies
to which one person adheres, assumes that others do as well, and, in a circular
way, takes for granted that others assume the same about them. Independent
of personal opinions, these expectancies consist of unstated maxims such
as: things are just as they appear to be, an object or event experienced now will
remain the same throughout a situated encounter with it, and any differing
experiences of an object or event are irrelevant for purposes of joint activity
(Garfinkel 1967:55–57).
Despite its dependency on common-sense knowledge, sociology as a field has
yet to confront the fact that there simply is no time out from its use at any level
of practical endeavor, including the most sophisticated theoretical and meth-
odological efforts of scientific activity itself. Contrastively, the usual attitude to-
ward common sense is captured in a trope that forms the subtitle of a book by
sociologist Duncan Watts (2011), which is provocatively entitled, Everything Is
Obvious Once You Know the Answer. The subtitle is: How Commonsense Fails
Us.1 Ethnomethodologically, it is not the case that common sense would fail us.
Simply put, common sense cannot fail us because, if it did, we would not have
a society. Even Watts (2011:9) recognizes that common sense is practical and
powerful in its “ability to deal with every concrete situation on its own terms.” He
is right about that, and it’s an insight upon which ethnomethodological studies
have built a formidable investigative enterprise. The task is to understand the
practices and achievements of common-sense competence at every point where
it is manifest: how, through common-sense actions, we produce our society as
a locally experienced affair. In this chapter, our vehicle for addressing common

Ethnomethodology and Atypical Interaction 443
sense and its analysis is the study of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and re-
search on atypical interaction more generally.
Ethnomethodological Ambitions and a Limitation
That professional social science might be more interested in ethnomethodology

than it has been is something that Garfinkel felt and conveyed in different kinds
of ways. It is implied strongly in the chapter on “Ways of Working” in the pre-
sent volume (Chapter 5; also see discussion in Chapter 1), when he suggests that
from the standpoint of the profession, the organization of ordinary activities—
ethnomethods or practices—are “unimportant phenomena.” When compared
to the enormous significance that we accord to gangs, role relationships, family
structures, bureaucracies, economic conditions—and, in the present day, inter-
sectional problems of race, class, sexuality, and gender—it could seem that the
organization in everyday activities is of “miniscule importance.” To challenge
that attitude, and to claim magnitude for ethnomethodology studies, he proposes
what he called a “figure of speech,” a kind of metaphor, where “the missing what”
of ethnomethodological studies could dwarf the typical concerns usually taken
as most central to sociology:
. . . The missing what that ethnomethodologists have been at the work of dis-
covering is available to lay and professional versions of organization in ordi-
nary activities as the earth stands to the presence of Mount Everest. Orderings
of ordinary activities are unimaginably extensive phenomena. . . . The claim is
this: there is one hell of a lot of it, more than we can ever imagine, more than we
ever would have imagined, where the more is such that we couldn’t have imag-
ined it without the work behind us. (Chapter 5:157, this volume)
This massive presence of orderly, common-sense actions also means that there is
an immense variety of practices whose presence for our everyday, ordinary, oc-
cupational, workaday, playful, and other social worlds have yet to be fully inves-
tigated and understood.
This legacy, at least from Garfinkel’s early work, comes with a limitation, how-
ever. On the one hand, Garfinkel (1967:31, our emphasis) argues, “Not a method
of understanding but immensely various methods of understanding are the pro-
fessional sociologist’s proper and hitherto unstudied and critical phenomena.”
Indeed, the ethnomethodological approach to common sense is one in which
analysts drop the assumption that common sense is a “what”—a substance
involving shared agreement—and instead take up the stance that common
sense is a “how” (Garfinkel 1967:28–29). The “how” question targets—among
other facets of embodied practices—those of reasoning and speaking, whether

in synonymous, ironic, metaphoric, cryptic, narrative, or other terms, such as
questioning, answering, lying, glossing, double-talking, etc.
To gain analytic access to such practices, Garfinkel’s (1967:37) stated pref-
erence was to “start with familiar scenes and ask what can be done to make
trouble.” For example, in his famous “incongruity” demonstrations, he directed
his students to question what their friends, acquaintances, or partners meant
by the most commonplace remarks. The result, Garfinkel (1967:42–44) shows,
is that the naïve target of the trouble can turn hostile rather quickly, begin
constructing the talk as “crazy,” and soon question the very health or even sanity
of the co-participant (“what’s the matter with you?”). This hostility derives from
the loss of trust—the seeming violation of mutuality or, more particularly, what
Schütz called the “congruency of relevancies,” whereby co-participants assume
of one another that they will interpret common phrases in an identical way and
without the need for “check out” or other corrective efforts (Garfinkel 1963:220).
Importantly, when one participant violates trust conditions, others treat the vio-
lation in terms of individual motivation—that the one is somehow covering up,
working too hard, ill, stressed, or otherwise indisposed (Garfinkel 1963:227, cf.
Heritage 1984b:99). That is, on the part of the common-sense actor, there is a
psychologizing of noncompliance with common sense.
This focus on common sense means that we learn about the naïve party’s
assumptions and attributions, but not about what naturally, as opposed to de-
liberately, may lead the “other”—the perpetrator—to disrupt matters in such
a way as to reveal those assumptions. That is, Garfinkel’s contrivances provide
for the analysis of sense-making practices of the targets of disruption, but not
those of agents who, in ordinary rather than contrived circumstances, may
themselves experience bewilderment because of common-sense incursions on
their “territories of self ” (Goffman 1971:Chapter 2, cf. Maynard 2019, Turowetz
2015b). However, Garfinkel’s statement about investigating “immensely var-
ious methods of understanding” implicates a more expansive approach to the
overall study of sense-making, one that is consistent with other ethnomethod-
ological work that takes naturalistic disruptions as a target of investigation (cf.
Maynard 2003:5–7). Among others, these include Garfinkel’s (1967:Chapter 5)
own study of a transgender person (see also Kristin Schilt’s Chapter 8 in this
volume), Pollner’s (1987) work on “reality disjunctures” in courtrooms and
other venues, and Coulter (1975, 1979) on psychiatric experiences and
encounters. Also closely related to our chapter are ethnographically informed
studies: entering the world of a deaf-blind person (Goode 1984), depicting a
family with a disabled child (Pollner and McDonald-Wikler 1985), or providing
autobiographical accounts of one’s experience with incapacity (Robillard 1999).
These studies reveal analytical insights that are as much about the unseen skills
of the disabled person as they are about the threats to abled common sense and
its strictures.
Conversation analytic (CA) scholars of language and neurological impair
ments in “atypical” interactions have been taking a similar tack for many years,
and they open a related topic, which is the possibility for alteration to or mod-
ification of common sense.2 Goodwin (2003a:8–10) has observed that, al-
though the inability to produce relevant speech—as in aphasia—can be “a major
failing in human competence,” interactions involving those with impairments
always occur within an “ecology of sign systems,” which includes the sequen-
tial organization of talk. More recently, in an edited volume drawing on CA for
investigations of atypical interaction, Wilkinson, Rae, and Rasmussen (2020) list
major features of turn-taking activities involving those with impaired linguistic
capabilities. These include delayed “progressivity” or movement through adja-
cency pair sequences, distinct patterns of repair initiation and repair, heightened
use of the indexical properties of talk by relying on gesture and “enactments”
and “re-enactments” (cf. Sidnell 2009), and an intensification of co-construction
or mutuality in assembling actions. Close inspection of sequential organization,
and the ecology of which it is a part, demonstrate that those with impairments
may be using forms of reasoning and communication via other-than-usual or
taken-for-granted practices. Furthermore, although resourceful in their own
right for persons with impairments, these practices may stimulate or elicit
awareness among co-participants of interactional differences, as opposed to
deficits. These typically performing members can then expand their repertoires
of common sense to facilitate the collaborative achievement of mutual under-
standing and joint action. In effect, this implicates reorganizing the local ecology
of sign systems, producing an expansion of common-sense knowledge.
We return to the topic of reorganizing local ecologies at the end of the chapter,
where we address how ethnomethodological inquiry can be informative about
ways to support and enhance the learning and understanding of those with im-
paired linguistic or social skills, such that they may better fit the social fabrics in
home, school, and other settings. However, this means changing or reweaving
those very fabrics, rather than attempting to alter the persons who have difficulty
fitting them. That is, our empirical analysis may show how children with ASD
can violate common-sense assumptions in clinics,3 and thereby aid our “slug-
gish imaginations” (Garfinkel 1967:38), increasing awareness of what clinicians’
“professional stocks of interactional knowledge” (Peräkylä and Vehviläinen
2003) in such environments take for granted as they implement testing and
other protocols. At the same time, analysis can go beyond the taken-for-granted
structures of common-sense and professional knowledge to reveal what Ochs
and Solomon (2004) call the “practical logic” that goes into the seeming violation
as it is constructed in the first place. In the end, ethnomethodological inquiry
suggests that there can be mutual adjustments between individuals with ASD or
other impairments and the clinical as well as ordinary settings they occupy.
Data and Organization of the Chapter
The data for this chapter include video recordings of two children being tested
for autism or other developmental disabilities. Data were collected in a devel-
opmental disabilities clinic, hereafter called Central Developmental Disabilities
Clinic (CDDC), which is associated with a university-based medical school.
Family members, pediatricians, educators, and others refer children to the clinic
for diagnosis and treatment of intellectual, speech, behavioral, and other dif-
ficulties. An interdisciplinary team of clinicians representing the fields of psy-
chology, psychiatry, speech pathology, developmental pediatrics, occupational
therapy, and/or others may see the child, administer their tests, and combine
their findings to determine a diagnosis.
Both children in our examples were eventually diagnosed with autism, al-
though the exact parameters of this diagnosis changed from one period to the
next (Maynard and Turowetz 2019). In our first case, a nine-year-old boy, “Dan
Chapman” (all names, including that of the CDDC, are pseudonyms) received
the diagnosis of ASD in 2014 under the auspices of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5; APA 2013). In our
second case, recorded in 1985, a seven-year-old boy, “Tony Smith,” was offi-
cially labeled as having infantile autism (Turowetz and Maynard 2018; Turowetz
2015b) based on the then-operative version of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (DSM-III; APA 1980). Each example exhibits how a child can fail a sub-
test, not just because of errors in answering, but because of more fundamental
flaws he exposes in the scaffolding upon which testing depends. Maynard and
Marlaire (1992) call this scaffolding an interactional substrate:
We refer to the interactional substrate of educational testing as consisting of

those skills of the clinician and child that allow them to arrive at an “account-
able” test score . . . one that is taken as objective, verifiable, valid, properly-
achieved, and so on, where that achievement depends upon an organization
of concerted practical actions that constitutes the participants’ interaction.
(1992:178)
We show how, in each of our two cases, clinicians report on what happens, not
as part of the official test results, but in an anecdotal way, casting the matter op-
timistically and depicting the failure as nevertheless having positive aspects for
the child. Valid as the clinical approach and official nomenclature may be, our
interactional analysis permits a more concrete, particularized version of what

happens in these episodes, one that is potentially expansively informative con-
cerning the child’s capabilities for social learning and relationships.
Autism and the Study of Common-Sense Knowledge
If autism provides the ethnomethodologist with access to the structures of

common sense, our interest is also in elucidating ASD itself. Writing in the
1940s, both Leo Kanner, who was the first person to identify autism as a dis-
tinct disorder in the English-speaking world, and Hans Asperger (after whom
the syndrome is named) highlighted the intelligence of the children they studied.
Kanner (1943) observes:
The astounding vocabulary of the speaking children, the excellent memory for
events of several years before, the phenomenal rote memory for poems and names,
and the precise recollection of complex patterns and sequences, bespeak good in-
telligence in the sense in which this word is commonly used. (1943:247–48)
And Asperger ([1944] 1991), although appreciating its Janus-faced quality,

writes about a child’s strong functioning on the Similarities subtest of the Binet
IQ examination:
Again, we found the peculiar signs of “autistic intelligence.” Performance was

best when he gave a spontaneous response, worst when he had to reproduce
learnt material or do something in a prescribed manner. His knowledge of the
world arose mainly out of his own experience and did not come from learning
from others. This is, of course, precisely what makes the achievements of au-
tistic people so often particularly original and delightful. ([1944] 1991:62)
Appreciation of autistic intelligence, coterminous with the rise in ASD diag-

nosis, is more widespread than ever before, as reflected in websites or web links
about hidden strengths (https://www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/
revealing-autisms-hidden-strengths/), self- advocacy groups, journalistic ac-
counts (Silberman 2015), popular scientific papers (Eveleth 2011), and the schol-
arly literature (Dawson et al. 2007)—including, especially, those informed by CA
(e.g., Muskett et al. 2010; Solomon 2015; Solomon and Lawlor 2018; Sterponi
and Kirby 2016:400–1). We (Maynard and Turowetz 2022) thematize this matter
of autistic intelligence in our recent monograph on autism diagnosis.
To a degree, what Kanner and Asperger discuss as autistic intelligence
comprises special talents that those on the spectrum may exhibit—exceptional
feats of vocabulary use, memory, orientations to local patterns, and the like.
When we discuss autistic intelligence, we mean more basic proficiencies, such as
those that make other actions and interactions possible. We regard these skills as
forms of first-order competence. Although those who work with someone on the
spectrum may be excellent at appreciating such skills, the practices comprising
them often exist at a level of detail that requires the tools of ethnomethodology
and CA for their analysis as socially organized phenomena—practices of talk and
embodied behavior that lead to achieving orderly engagement with another par-
ticipant. We also have referred to such practices as “fundamental” competence,
a term meant to convey the primacy of these skills as a mode of collaboratively
engaging the world (Maynard and Turowetz 2022: Chapter 4). By contrast, what
we call “second-order” or “structural” competence refers to the capacity or ability
to use first-order competences to perform particular tasks, such as those that a di-
agnostic test is designed to assess. First-order competence involves such practices
as providing an “answer” in the sequential slot after a question, independent of
whether the answer is correct or, on a more basic level, orients to the question as
a test question per se. Accordingly, second-order competence is parasitic upon
first-order competence for its realization; first-order competence, meanwhile, is a
necessary condition for second-order competence, but not a sufficient one.
First-order competence and the interactional substrate of which it is a part
comprise, by Garfinkel’s metaphor, the surface of the billiard ball or the earth.
To adopt the earth-based analogy, second-order competence includes the pro-
ficiency to scale a mountain, starting from that autochthonous surface. As we
examine two clinical cases, we address why understanding the social orderliness
exhibited in and as autistic intelligence and first-order competence is a conse-
quential matter, both for individuals with ASD and for the communities in which
they exist. At the end of the chapter, when we return to the topic of common
sense, it is to recap how pervasive a phenomenon it is, and how it demands al-
legiance from society’s members, even in clinical settings. When that allegiance
is apparently lacking, we also can see how common-sense pervasiveness comes
with exclusionary tendencies, at worst, and a kind of bemused tolerance, even
positivity, at best. In contrast, our data allow us to explore how, within the
exhibits of autistic intelligence, there may be hidden-in-plain-sight, suppressed
contributions to learning and knowledge on the part of individuals with ASD.
Clinical Cases
In each of our two clinical cases, there is a failure to achieve a feature of the inter-
actional substrate of psychological testing required for successful completion of
a task. That is, common-sense features of test administration are violated. One
of these features is that the clinician is to provide testing prompts in a directive
fashion, with the child complying by producing the called-for action—an an-
swer, performance, etc. In essence, testing often consists of a series of directive-
response sequences— a subtype of “adjacency pairs,” which are so- named
because such pairs consist of two utterances, adjacently positioned, with a first
utterance initiating and a second one responding and completing the sequence
(Schegloff and Sacks 1973). More specifically, directive-response sequences con-
sist of (A) utterances designed “to get someone else to do something” (Goodwin
2006:517)—offers, requests, orders, prohibitions, etc.—and (B) responses indi-
cating compliance, avoidance, refusal, and the like (Cekaite 2010; Craven and
Potter 2010; Ervin-Tripp 1976; Goodwin 2006). Such sequences also involve
prosody—pitch, emphasis, volume, stress, pacing—and embodiment, including
gaze, gesture, and other movements (Goodwin, Cekaite, and Goodwin 2012).
They are embedded “. . . within a larger temporal horizon” (Goodwin and Cekaite
2013)—in our data, the overall testing activity.
Case 1: Refusal to Comply
At the time of his evaluation at the CDDC, Dan Chapman was nine years and two
months of age and in the third grade at school. Dan’s pediatrician referred him
because of his “significant behavioral challenges,” including a history of aggres-
sive and disruptive behavior at school, difficulty with two-way conversations—
although he could talk for hours on topics of interest to him, such as cars—and
other matters. At CDDC, a number of specialists saw Dan. We are concen-
trating on a small subtest that the psychologist, Dr. “Jennifer Carson,” gave to
Dan as she administered the Autism Diagnostic and Observation Schedule
(ADOS-2, module 3), the so-called gold standard (Dawson et al. 2007:659) for
ASD assessments. The subtest is called a “Demonstration Task,” in which the
clinician is to assess “the participant’s ability to communicate about a familiar
series of actions using gesture or mime with accompanying language” (Lord
et al. 2012:113).4 The test manual instructs the clinician to say, using appro-
priate gestures, “Let’s pretend that this is the sink, this is the hot water, and this
is the cold water,” and then to “pretend to draw the toothbrush.” Next, the cli-
nician should state, “Now I want you to show me and tell me how to brush my
teeth. Start right at the beginning. You’ve just come into the bathroom to brush
your teeth. What do you do now?” Although Jennifer follows these directions
closely, Dan consistently refuses the directives and requests to do the demonstra-
tion task.
Refusals as Betraying a Motivational Problem

Whatever the source of Dan’s refusals, his deployment of nonvocalized tactics,
enacted via moving or shaking his head laterally (as he keeps his arms folded and
resting on the table in front of him for the duration of the episode) shows first-
order competence. In terms of head position and gaze, he is fully engaged with Jen
throughout. At line 1 in Extract 1a, Jen’s prefacing characterization of the task as
“kinda silly” may acknowledge its unusual character, a subterranean admission of
how it departs from usual, everyday activities.5 After Jen’s relatively entitled (Curl
and Drew 2008) directive (“So I want you . . .”) that announces the nature of the
task (lines 3–4), Dan engages in a lateral head shake at line 5. The head shaking is
denoted in the brackets, indicating that it is in overlap with Jen’s continued, im-
peratively formatted directive, “So watch this” (line 4). In Figure 17.1, there are
three frames captured from the video, corresponding to line 5, which show how
the head movement appears as Jen, with her arm extended, begins to show him
the “pretend” hot water, cold water, etc. (lines 8–9). Thereafter, at the approxi-
mate juncture where it occurs, we note Dan’s head shaking with arrows and the
cumulative number (accompanying the arrows) of the gesture. For transcription
conventions used in this chapter, see Schegloff (2007: Appendix 1).
Extract1a: case 24:PYDX:156

1 Jen: All right. So the next thing I’d like to do is kinda
2 silly. .hh I want you to pretend that I don’t know how to
3 brush my teeth, okay(h):? So(h) I want you to sho::w me and
4 tell me how you brush your teeth. [So watch this, ]
5 Dan: [((Lat. head shake))] ←1
6 Jen: .hh So here’s a pretend sink.
7 (0.7)
8 Jen: Here’s the <hot water> (0.5) cold water (0.4) tooth brush (0.3)
9 toothpaste and a cup.
10 (.)
11 Jen: Can you show me and tell me how you brush your teeth?
(a) Dan moves his head to his right (b) Dan moves head to his left (c) Dan moves head back
Figure 17.1 Demonstration task with Dan and Jennifer

12 (2.4) ((Dan shifts gaze downward from Jen to the table))

13 Jen: Pretend I’m an alien and I have no: idea.
14 (.)
15 Jen: [Keheh heh.
]
16 Dan: [((Lat. head shake))] ←2
17 (0.4)
18 Jen: You don’t wanna try that?
19 (1.0) ((Dan does lat. head shake)) ←3
During what may be termed instructional directives at lines 6, 8–9, which both
inform Dan and suggest using pretend items in the demonstration, Dan is gazing
at Jen. Following a micropause (line 10), Jen shifts from the previous entitled
form (“I want you to show me . . . ,” line 3) to one featuring a lesser, but still enti-
tled, modal preface (“Can you . . . ,” line 11; cf. Curl and Drew 2008). Further, as
Craven and Potter (2010:437) formulate the matter, “can you”–type directives
potentially orient “to the recipient’s capacities and desires.” There is a subtle, im-
portant distinction here between ability and motivation, as we will see. At this
point, Dan shifts his gaze downward and away from Jen (line 12), maintaining
this head posture as she produces a further instructional directive that tacitly
characterizes the task as a playful one (line 13). During this utterance, Dan shifts
his gaze back to Jen.
As Jen produces laughter tokens (line 15), Dan engages in a second instance of
lateral head shaking (line 16). Next, Jennifer proposes his lack of compliance is
motivationally based (line 18), indicating that the directive at line 11 also impli-
cated a motivational feature. She does this by way of a negative declarative—a re-
quest for confirmation—that goes up upward on the gradient of epistemic stance
(Heritage 2010). The source of Dan’s refusal to do this task is within Dan’s own
epistemic domain, yet Jen (at line 18) is asserting knowledge of Dan’s internal
state by proposing that his refusal is attributable to not wanting to do the task. In
that sense, this is a strong exhibit of clinical if not lay common-sense knowledge.
It also is in line with how members regularly handle a breach of common-sense
conduct, such as the conditional relevance of an answer to a test question: as
Garfinkel (1963, 1967) demonstrated, the inference is that there must be a moti-
vational problem of some kind (cf. Heritage 1984b:99). By inviting confirmation
of what it declares, and in following a series of refusals, the form and placement
of the sequence at lines 18–19 are closure-implicative, rather presumptively set-
tling the matter of Dan’s performance so far.
Jen, the professional and common-sense actor, interprets Dan’s refusal to
her relatively entitled requesting (starting with “I want you to sho::w me and
tell me how you brush your teeth,” lines 3–4), first as a matter of ability (“Can
you . . . ,” line 11), and then as a matter of willfulness (line 18). In the absence of
any claim that he cannot do the task (line 12), Dan’s ability to do the task comes
to be presumed; accordingly, Jen’s suggestion, “you don’t wanna . . .” (line 18),
treats the issue as one of volition. Again, this is consonant with Garfinkel’s
suggestions about the way that a violation of trust conditions results in motiva-
tional imputations and the psychologizing of noncompliance.
Modeling a Demonstration
The instruction manual for the ADOS Demonstration Task (Lord et al. 2012:113)
states that if a participant “does not understand the idea of the task” and “does
not attempt the task,” then it is permissible to enact “a different event” for the
subject, such as how one drives a car. Jennifer does this next. She proposes such
an enactment (lines 20 and 21 in the following), but Dan now does a fourth re-
fusal gesture (line 22).
Extract 1b: Case 24 ADOS

20 Jen: How ’bout we do another one (0.9) I’ll: show you: how I drive
21 a car, okay?
23 Jen: Tch (0.2) S:o firs:t:
24 (.)
25 Jen: I:: (0.5)take out the [key:: (0.2) and I put it in the ignition]
26 Dan: 5a→ [wider lateral headshake
]
27 (0.2) ((lateral head shaking continues))←5b
28 Jen: [And I put it in the ignition,]
29 Dan: [lat. head shaking.
]←5c
30 Jen: [And then I- ]
31 Dan: [lat. head shaking]←5d
32 (0.9) ((Jen twists wrist as if turning key))
33 Dan: I know how [to learn to drive.]
34 Jen: [turn it o]n:
35 (0.7) ((Jen finishes the turning-key gesture))
36 Jen: You ↑do:? [(.) .hhh And then: I:::] .hh move it out of:=
37 Dan: [((nodding with smile))]
38 Jen: =↑par:k (1.1) and then I: put my foot on the gas pedal (0.5) and
39 then I tu:r:n the steering whee::l, (0.7) then I put my foot on
40 the ↑brake? (1.0) when I stop, (.) I put it back into park, (1.8)
41 ↑turn it off, (.) and take the key out. (0.2) Okay?
42 (0.9) ←6 ((head shake; Dan gazes at the table then back at Jen))
Jennifer ignores Dan’s refusal gesture and, miming how to drive a car, she
narrates the process (lines 23, 25, 28, 30). Dan now deploys head-shaking that
is more vigorous in its amplitude than before (see overlapping indications

at lines 26, 27, 29, and 31). These (arrows at 5a, 5b, 5c, and 5d) are his fifth
use of the gesture. At line 32, he ceases the head shaking and then, at line 33,
announces that he “knows how to learn to drive,” which may be a claim to
have knowledge about the matter Jennifer is modeling. The claim is in overlap
with Jennifer’s enactment and talk about turning the car on (lines 32, 34, 35).
At this point (line 36), with rapidly rising pitch that can indicate “surprise”
(Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2006), she asks for confirmation,6 which Dan
provides (line 37) by his first vertical head shake—nodding—in the episode;
this gesture dramatically contrasts with his refusals up until this point.
As Dan nods and Jennifer pauses slightly and breathes in, she lifts her left hand
to match the mid-body position of her right one (which has been doing “keying”
moves) and begins to show “steering” motions as she continues with her narrated
enactment of driving a car (lines 36, 38–41). Dan mostly is watching her during
this narration, but, just after she says “Okay?” at line 41, he briefly shifts gaze
away and toward the table (line 42) in what appears to be a further, sixth negating
motion (arrow 6).
Another Try at Getting Dan to Perform

Per ADOS instructions, Jennifer next directs Dan, in a mitigated way with the
“how ’bout” preface,7 to do a different demonstration concerned with washing
one’s face (lines 43–44 in the following). For a seventh time, Dan responds with
a denying shake of the head (line 45). At line 46, Jennifer produces an “inclusive”
directive (Goodwin and Cekaite 2014), which also proposes continuation, rather
than something new (Stivers and Sidnell 2016), followed by a “cajoling” or “en-
couraging” utterance (cf. Craven and Potter 2010:429). But Dan again shakes his
head—an eighth gesture of denial (line 47), and a similar directive (line 48) elicits
a ninth (line 49).
Extract 1c: Case 24 ADOS

43 Jen: S:o: (0.3) how ’bout you sh:ow me and tell: me:, you show
44 me and tell me how you’d wash your fac:e?
46 Jen: °Let’s do that one°=I think you can do it. ((Jennifer nodding))
48 Jen: Let’s just give it a try. [(.) .hh So if we ha::ve,]
49 Dan: [( (lat. head shake) ) ] ←9
50 (0.5) ((Jennifer reaches forward with right hand))
51 Jen: a sink here [(0.4) hot water ]
52 Dan: [((lat. head shake))] ←10
53 (0.2)
54 Jen: Cold [water

]
55 Dan: [((lat. head shake))] ←11
56 (0.5)
57 Jen: [S:oap
58 Dan: [((lat. head shake)) ←12
59 (1.3) ((Dan begins to stand up))
60 Jen: [And a wash cloth.
61 Dan: [((Stands up fully and begins to walk to his right))
62 (1.6) ((Dan walks to room corner, near mother, behind chair))
63 Jen: You don’t wanna try that one? (0.6) Okay.
64 (0.6)
65 Jen: ↑We’ll do something else then, arright
Nevertheless, Jennifer proceeds to exhibit the setup for such a demonstration

(lines 48, 50–51, 54, 57), as Dan shakes his head “no” for the tenth, eleventh,
and twelfth times (lines 52, 55, 58). At this point (line 59), he begins to stand
up from the table. During Jennifer’s further setup announcement (line 60), in a
starkly definitive form of refusal, he walks away (line 61) and goes to a corner of
the room, just to the left of where his mother is sitting and behind a chair next to
her (line 62). With a motivational account embedded in a negative declarative
similar to the earlier one at line 18, Jennifer resorts to a by-now-familiar form of
psychologizing, proposing to Dan, “You don’t wanna try that one?” Following a
silence and ratifying “okay” (line 63), Jennifer then closes the episode by offering
to go on to another (ADOS) activity (line 65).
Dan’s Withdrawal
Dan’s mother, Mrs. Chapman, asks Dan (not on transcript here), “Are you
all done right now,” and “Do you want a break?” Dan then crouches behind
the chair with his back to it and to Jennifer, who is diagonally across the room
from the chair. He is not visible from her position, and he remains behind the
chair for nearly 20 seconds before standing up again. Concurrently, his mother
observes, “At this point he is basically . . .” and draws her hand in a cutting ges-
ture across her neck. Jennifer offers some “cards,” to which Dan (still standing
behind the chair) responds “Uh uh” [no] as she tells him that they do not have
to do the tooth brushing. She also retrieves a fire truck, but he shows disinterest
by observing that he has “more than one at home.” As he and Mrs. Chapman
discuss the truck and cars they have at home, Jennifer pulls out a toy with three-
dimensional movable metal pins for making impressions of hands, small toys,
and other objects—sometimes called a “pin art game.” That this toy draws Dan
back to the table from where he started suggests that its tactile affordances may
have been central. More crucially, just as Dan takes the toy and forms it around
his hand, he says, “This is easy,” which, from his own perspective, suggests a tacit
contrast with the preceding demonstration task as something hard or difficult.
That is, whereas Jen distantly, from a lesser epistemic position, interprets Dan’s
refusals as “won’t,” he displays an orientation to “can’t.”8
Motivational Accounting
After his return, Jennifer is able to complete the ADOS exam with Dan. When
she scores his exam, it meets the cutoff for the ASD diagnosis, which is not of
central concern here (however, see Maynard and Turowetz 2022). Rather, our
concern is with the interpretations of Dan’s conduct, however fleeting—partic-
ularly the ways in which clinicians, not only within the exam itself, but also in
their discussions afterward, orient to Dan’s noncompliance as a problem of mo-
tivation. His “pre-staffing”—a case conference where clinicians decide on diag-
nosis—included the developmental pediatrician, Dr. “Leah Grant;” Dr. Carson
(Jennifer), the psychologist; and a psychology student intern (“Leslie”). At lines
88–89, Jen refers to the episode captured in Extracts 1a–1c as showing Dan’s
“most a:typical response,” a term that in clinical settings indexes ASD. It takes
several more turns of talk for her and the student to recall the part of the test
where it occurred. At lines 90–92, Leslie, the student, characterizes Dan’s action
using a phrase, “he just got up . . .” that, by way of the “just” term, suggests that
the behavior was less than the required performance.
Extract 1d: Case 24 case conference

88 Jen: I’d say the: the most a:typical response he had was that one time
89 when he (.) got up [and he: walked away to the corner.]
90 Les: [What wuh- what was the question]
91 (rather) insisting and that he didn’t like and he just got up
92 [and walked (0.5) I find it frustrating.
93 Jen: [↑It was: a (little) hard question. ((looking at notes)) It was um-
94 (0.3)
95 Les: You said to do something and he just didn’t wanted to do it.
96 (8.0) ((Leah asks for camera shift, while Jen reviews ADOS notes))
97 Jen: It was the demonstration test? So: asking him to show me how he
98 brushes [teeth? I think it was just-] he felt on the spot=
99 Les: [↑Y:e:::ah. That would be ()]
100 Jen: =and so he just got up an:d (.) [walked away into the corner, but=
101 Leah: [Walked away.
he ↑came back and I just brought out the break toys ...
102 Jen: =
Furthermore, at line 95 the student, Leslie, depicts Dan as not wanting to par-
ticipate—using the “just” term in a slightly different way, but one that still
conveys less than optimal performance. Jen (at lines 98, 100) also formulates
Dan as feeling “on the spot” in a way that occasioned his abandonment of the
demonstration.
While Jen suggests an optimistic take on the event—“but he came back” (lines
100, 102)—the motivational account and Leslie’s sense of frustration (line 92) are
in accord with regular features of recipients’ emotional reactions to breaching
as they formulate perpetrators’ moral accountability. The account and even the
frustration (with reference to “it” and Dan’s own behavior) abstract details from
a much more complex set of interactions, including Dan’s full-bodied orienta-
tion to Jennifer throughout the episode, and the sheer number and persistence
of Dan’s refusals.9 These refusals exhibit forms of first-order competence—
practices that lie in the interactional substrate of testing and that are an earth-
wise grounding, so to speak, for the Mount Everest of his withdrawal. There is
also the strong possibility that he is being asked to do something he is unable to
do, rather than will not do. The tacit contrast that Dan’s “this is easy” statement
may draw in relation to the pin art task suggests that, from his perspective, the
problem in complying with the task may have had to do with his ability, rather
than his motivation.
Standardizing the Assessment

In dealing with circumstances such as those where Dan does not demonstrate
how to brush one’s teeth, the ADOS instructions (as noted earlier) suggest that
the clinician can demonstrate a different event, e.g., driving a car. Jennifer is in
the midst of doing this (see lines 19–34, Extract 1b) when Dan announces
(line 32 in the following) both vocally and through gesturing (e.g., line 36) that
he already knows how to “learn to drive”:
Extract 1e: (from extract 1b, lines 32–38)

32 Dan: I know how [to learn to drive.]
33 Jen: [turn .it o]n:
34 (0.7) ((Jen finishes the turning-key gesture))
35 Jen: You ↑do:?
36 Dan: [((nodding with smile))]
37 Jen: [(.) .hhh And then: I::: ] .hh move it out of:↑par:k (1.1) and
38 then I: put my foot on the gas pedal
At line 35, Jen produces a newsmark (cf. Heritage 1984a:note 13; Jefferson
1981) that asks for confirmation. However, as Dan confirms by nodding and
smiling (line 36), she immediately continues with the demonstration (lines 37–38
and subsequently). Although this fits with instructions for administering the
instrument, to which examiners orient as a basis for achieving standardized test
results, we can only imagine or speculate as to how differently this task may have
gone had Jen responded (or been allowed to respond10) more fully to Dan’s an-
nouncement, and whether following up may have facilitated a “demonstration”
performance after all.11 We return to this point in our Conclusion.
Case 2: Who Is Directing Whom? Competition

for First Position
Tony Smith was seven years and ten months old when his parents, at the rec-
ommendation of a school social worker, referred him to CDDC because of his
repetitive utterances and other “autistic-like behaviors.” We examine an episode
that occurred during the administration of a subtest from the Psychoeducational
Profile (PEP) that requires a child to assemble puzzle pieces into images, in this
case a cow. During this episode, Tony and Laura (a special education clinician)
had difficulty in achieving joint attention, or co-orientation, and eventually the
subtest was abandoned.
Positioning in Directive-Response Sequences

A feature of directive-response sequences is positioning. As actions, directives
are in first position in a sequence, while responses are in second position. In
responding to an initial directive with a directive-like return, however, recipients
produce what can be called counter-directives (Schegloff 2007:16–19), and we
will see how such counter-directives are operative in the “cow puzzle” example
involving Laura and Tony. Although the participants do not achieve co-orienta-
tion in any sustained way, we can note that, just before the cow puzzle, Tony had
successfully assembled a simpler puzzle picture of a cat. It had four pieces (com-
pared with six for the cow), and these had jagged edges (compared to straight
edges for the cow), which may matter for a child’s orientation to assembling the
puzzle.
The interaction between Laura and Tony during the cow puzzle effort can be
viewed in two ways: one in which Tony is noncompliant with Laura’s directives,
and the other in which it is Laura who is noncompliant with Tony’s (counter)
directives. Whereas the cow pictured on the puzzle is two-dimensional, and
the kinesthetic aspects of assembling it are subordinated to achieving a visual
solution, Tony, in a sense, is embedded in a three-dimensional world where
touching and holding (as well as seeing) comprise a somatic, tactile orienta-
tion to his surroundings. In Figure 17.2a, Tony has grabbed the pieces of the
puzzle (from his left side on the table) and begins banging them together as
he lines them up on the board in front of him, without apparent regard for the
projected picture.
Figure 17.2a Tony manipulates cow puzzle pieces; Laura watches
This tension between three dimensions and kinesthesia, on the one hand,
and two dimensions (requiring visual concentration), on the other, persists
throughout the episode and parallels a kind of strain between following an exter-
nally imposed (picture) plan and, for Tony, the immediate tactile availability of
the puzzle pieces themselves.
In the analysis to follow, it will be shown that Tony’s failure to properly as-
semble the puzzle results from pursuing an activity that exhibits first-order
competence—indulging the “affordances” (Gibson 1986) of the puzzle pieces as
manipulatable objects—rather than following the clinician’s directives to make
a picture. Although at odds with test requirements, Tony’s resistance suggests
not so much an inability to understand Laura, or the interactional objective
prescribed by the test, as an orientation to a different interactional objective.
Laura’s initial move is a bald directive (line 1), one with no modality or politeness
markers, and includes a possibly enticing “for me” appendage.
Extract 2a: Psychoeducational Profile “Cow” puzzle

1 Lau: You try this puzzle for me.
2 (0.4) ((grabs for puzzle pieces))
3 Tony: Watch
4 (6.5)
5 Lau: This is a picture of a co::w. (0.2) Can you make a
6 picture of a co::w?
7 (12.5) ((Tony bangs & lines up 2 pieces, puts 3rd piece on board))
8 Lau: That’s right. This is a picture of a co:::w.
9 (4.2) ((Tony shakes head, bangs/slides pieces of puzzle))
10 Tony: .hh (°Wa°)ss-((“watch”))
11 (18.0) ((Laura writes in booklet, Tony lifts puzzle pieces))
12 Lau: Want me to show you?
13 (1.5) ((Laura leans in and grabs upper left piece))
14 Lau: Loo:k I’ll make the cow for you.
15 (0.9) ((Laura moves upper right piece to upper left))
16 Lau: I’ll help you, put that one here. ((Laura points; Tony resists))
17 Tony: Eh- [↑NO DON’[T HELP me::! ((slides 2 upper left pieces back))
18 Lau: [You- [((Laura withdraws arm and leans head on r. hand))
19 Lau: You wanna try it yourself?
20 (6.0) ((Tony slides pieces to line them up))
21 Lau: Oka:::y?
22 (5.2) ((Tony slides upper row to line up with lower))
23 Lau: ((pointing to and gesturing with upper middle piece)) Turn this
24 one arou::nd. °Turn this one arou:nd.°
25 (2.8) ((Tony turns it quarter way around))
26 Lau: One muh-all:: the way around.
27 (2.0) ((Tony turns it further))
28 Lau: Oka::y?
29 (1.2) ((T moves lower l. & r. pieces slightly))
30 Lau: No:::w::? let’s see . . .
Instead of complying with Laura, Tony, from the very outset (lines 2–4), takes
over the manipulation of puzzle pieces and, immediately after Laura’s line 1 di-
rective, issues a counter-directive (“watch,” line 3).
Directive and Counter-Directive; Compliance and Noncompliance

In one view, Laura is in first position in these sequences, and Tony is resisting
her. After her first move and Tony’s responses (lines 2–4), she initially produces
what we call an instructional directive, “This is a picture of a cow” (line 5), which
describes the end state of what Tony is to accomplish while tacitly directing him
to achieve it. Then, after a brief pause, and with its “Can you” preface, Laura
produces a further directive or request (lines 5–6) that indexes her lesser epi-
stemic position, and, in terms of recognizing contingencies related to fulfillment,
is moderately entitled (Curl and Drew 2008). After she affirms Tony’s movements
with the puzzle pieces (line 8), Laura produces a further instructional directive,
followed by other directives formatted as help offerings (lines 12, 14, 16).
Overall, Tony is in second position as he resists Laura’s directives, and is non-

compliant, either by telling Laura what to do (lines 3, 10), continuing with his
own activity (lines 4, 7, 9-11), using a lateral and negative head shake (line 9), or
rejecting Laura’s explicit offers of help (lines 12, 14, 16) with an also explicit, loud,
and high-pitched refusal (line 17). Put differently, Laura works to exert her deontic
authority (Sterponi 2003; Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012; Zinken and Ogiermann
2011)—her taken-for-granted right to determine the testing course of action.
Tony, however, may not be aware of that course of action12 and, in any case, exhibits
strong forms of resistance or “deontic incongruence” (Stevanovic and Peräkylä
2012). Laura, moreover, interprets the matter motivationally—his desire to do
things on his own—and responds with an offer (line 19: “wanna try it . . .”).
However, in another view, Tony, by issuing his counter-directive at line 3,
which is bald and direct like the one that it counters, also asserts deontic au-
thority, arrogating first sequential position as he works to build a different co-
constructed course of action. Counter-moves reverse the direction of constraint
in adjacency pair sequences (Schegloff 2007:16–17). In effect, Tony is proposing
to take over first position. As Tony also continues with his manipulations of
puzzle pieces (as at lines 7, 9, 11), those too are a kind of embodied instructional
directive. That is, with his continued manipulations of the pieces, he is displaying
the relevant social actions and his favored orientations to these pieces in a tactile
way. And, if Laura is in second position relative to his initiations, then, depending
on what she does, it is she who can be seen as compliant or noncompliant by
aligning, or not, to his tacit instructions. Furthermore, from Tony’s perspective,
it may be Laura who is breaching a collaborative order of sense-making.13
Thus, during the silence at line 4, she watches Tony manipulate the puzzle
pieces, and is thereby compliant with his line of action. However, at lines 5–6
and 8, her directives are noncompliant. Nevertheless, she embodies compliance
at lines 8–10 as she watches Tony for almost 25 seconds. However, after she is-
sues her offers of help (lines 12, 14, and 16), Tony (at line 17, with “No don’t
help me!”14) rejects them, thereby treating these offers as noncompliant with the
course of action he is pursuing. It could be said that Tony’s actions provide a set
of sequentially based expectations in their own right.15 Finally, Laura acquiesces,
rests her head on her hands (line 18), and watches Tony again for 6 seconds (line
20) as he moves pieces of the puzzle into place.
Tony’s ability to produce counter-directives and, through visible manipula
tions, perform a kind of embodied instructional directive, is a form of first-order
competence. As in the episodes involving Dan, we can document a set of skills in
the interactional substrate forming something like the presence of the earth rela-
tive to the Mount Everest of Tony’s non-adherence to a taken-for-granted feature
of testing—the usual, common-sense requirement to comply with directives or
requests initiated by a clinician. As well, first-order competence is collaborative,
incorporating the design of the test instrument—the affordances for tactile em-
bodiment presented by the puzzle pieces—such that Tony can orient to the task dif-
ferently from what is proposed to him. Tony’s first-order competence in knowing
how to redirect the activity is also collaborative, in that he does obtain compliance
from Laura. Following her initial exhibit of watching (line 4), she eventually (line
19) aligns to his activity (“you wanna try it yourself?”). This follows his display
of affect through the prosody of his “No don’t help me” response (line 17). Tony’s
stance, and indeed its very prosody, in the way that it occasions such alignment, is
also a form of first-order competence that children in typical family environments
use to resist parental directives (Goodwin, Cekaite, and Goodwin 2012:29).
Motivational Accounting
The directive-response sequences do not work well—there continues to be in-
tense competition over first and second position, and eventually the participants
give up on the matter. Or, more accurately, Laura gives up and, shortly after the
more successful exchange at lines 23–30 in Extract 2a, says to Tony, “We’re all
done with the cow.” They then put the puzzle pieces away.
Subsequently, in both the pre-staffing case conference and the staffing—the
informing interview where the results and diagnosis were delivered to Tony’s
parents and teachers—the clinicians refer to Tony’s actions during the cow puzzle
episode. In the case conference, an occupational therapist (OT) was discussing
Tony’s “tactile system” and his “hyper” responsiveness when she next stated,
“Uh, he’s very much into not being helped.” Laura immediately began nodding
her head, produced several beats of laughter and, when the OT began a further
report, “And it seemed more like . . . ,” finished the utterance with “HIS way,”
adding “You have to help him his way.” During this talk, a speech and language
student produced continuous laughter, and the OT finalized matters by saying,
“Yeah, it’s an independence thing, not so much that he doesn’t like to be han-
dled or touched; it’s more—he wanted to do it his way,” thereby fully agreeing
with Laura. Accordingly, the interactional dynamics during the puzzle episode
are reduced to a matter of Tony’s motivation, while the parties also exhibit an af-
fective dimension to their perceptions by smiling and laughing.
These features are also exhibited at the informing interview involving the
parents. The following episode (Extract 2 below) occurs during the discussion
of testing results, where the diagnosis has not yet been broached. “Molly” is the
psychiatrist on the team who examined Tony; at lines 1–5, on the parents’ be-
half, she asks her colleagues for an example of “some of the concepts” that Tony
is “currently working on.” At line 6, Laura prefaces a story referencing the cow
puzzle (although not explicitly naming it). The story follows a pattern with three
aspects: First, Laura offers contrastive versions of Tony’s tendencies. One is that
“awhile ago he wanted help with everything” (line 8), whereas “now” (lines 8,
10) Tony is “sort of rejecting” offers of help—as indeed we saw previously in

Extract 2a. Another contrast is between interpreting this as “contrary behavior”
(line 11) rather than “struggling with being . . . independent” (line 14).
Extract 2 from Staffing: Case_M_STF_3:4544

1 Molly: What I was going to do was go through their ... trying to figure
2 out (0.4) some of the concepts .hh that he’s currently working
3 on, trying to understand, um that-that was one of the things
4 that I was interested in ferreting out. Have you got an example
5 [(related) to that?]
6 Laura: [I have- ] I have an example. It’s a real-it’s a
7 s
ma::ll one but it might demonstrate that uhm-it’s the help not
8 h
elp, a while ago he wanted help [with every]thing. And no::w=
9 Molly: [Mm hmm. ]
10 Laura: =it-when you wanna offer help, he’s sort of (.) rejecting and
11 then you ’n could interpret that as sort of contrary behavior
12 t
hat he’s sort of, rejecting you know what’s going on when the
13 reality is he’s trying to struggle with being-.hhh too might be
14 struggling with being a little bit more independent [but-]
15 Molly: [Yes,] and
16 i
t goes along with the emergence, of his showing pri::de in
17 being able [to do ] things.
18 Mom: [Mm hmm]
19 Mom: Mm hm
A second aspect to the story involves depicting Tony’s behavior as a product of

his own agency; as being motivated independently from the interactional con-
text where his conduct is co-produced. As we saw, however, Tony and Laura
competed over positions in directive-response sequences. His counter-directives
were elicited by her efforts to gain cooperation with a testing routine, rather than
engaging in a more embodied, playful one. A third aspect is how Molly receives
Laura’s story with an optimistic upshot about the “emergence” of his “pride”
(lines 16–17), thereby further depicting his counter-directive practices as moti-
vationally based.
Standardizing the Assessment

As with Dan, in Tony’s case there is also an imposition from the necessity of
standardized testing that may have interfered with a potential for success with
the cow-puzzle task. We focus on the segment when Tony enjoins Laura to not
“help” him:
Extract 2b: from 2a, lines 17–31

17 Tony: E
h-[↑NO DON[T HELP me::! ((slides 2 upper left pieces back))
18 Lau: [
You- [((Laura withdraws arm and leans head on r. hand))
19 Lau: You wanna try it yourself?
20 (6.0) ((Tony slides pieces to line them up))
21 Lau: Oka:::y?
22 (5.2) ((Tony slides upper row to line up with lower))
23 Lau: ((pointing to and gesturing with upper middle piece)) Turn this
24 one arou::nd. °Turn this one arou:nd.°
25 (2.8) ((Tony turns it quarter way around))
26 Lau: One muh-all:: the way around.
27 (2.0) ((Tony turns it further))
28 Lau: Oka::y?
29 (1.2) ((T moves lower l. & r. pieces slightly))
30 Lau: No:::w::? let’s see.
31 (2.2)
Remarkably, after Laura pulls her arm back and says, “You wanna try it yourself,”
as a kind of permissive directive (line 19), leaning her chin on her arm to watch
what he does with the tiles (Figures 17.2b and c) and subsequently issuing direct-
ives about placement (lines 23–24, 26, and Figure 17.2d), Tony complies (lines
25, 27). But now these directives by Laura are not strictly in first position within
Figure 17.2b After Tony says, “No don’t help me!” (line 17)
Figure 17.2c Laura watches Tony slide the puzzle pieces (line 20)
Figure 17.2d “Turn this one around” (line 24)
a directive-response sequence; rather, they are subordinated to an alignment with

Tony’s ongoing activity. Accordingly, there is a belated achievement of joint atten-
tion to the puzzle’s affordances as a two-dimensional puzzle.
The positioning of this achievement is in line with research showing that

follow-in directives—those that trail a child’s focus of attention—obtain more
compliance than initiating directives, and possibly enhance speech comprehen-
sion and production (Brigham et al. 2010; Haebig, McDuffie, and Weismer 2013;
Mirenda and Donnellan 1986; Siller and Sigman 2002). It is as if, at this point,
Laura works with Tony in a way that is consistent with a “formative” orientation
and “locally usable knowledge” (Erickson 2007:187) relevant to his performance
on the test.
However, just after line 30, Laura further attempts to guide Tony (Extract 2c
below), and they again enter a series where Laura issues directives—this time, an
unrelenting series of them (lines 32, 34, 36). Briefly, they are suspended as Tony
issues a counter-directive (line 38) and an announcement (line 41, Figure 17.2e),
to which Laura aligns (lines 42–44), but then, latching to her “you like open the
door” acknowledgment at line 43, immediately resumes directing him (lines 43–
44, 46, 49, 51).
At lines 49–50, Laura is tapping on a puzzle piece and pointing to “where
it goes;” she then she moves the piece (line 50). At line 52, Tony interjects
“Don’t help me,” which has similar pitch contours and stretching to line 17 in
Extract 2a,16 but without the increased volume. Such utterances treat the dir-
ectives they follow as “adversarial actions” (Goodwin and Cekaite 2014:208),
Figure 17.2e “He opens the door;” Laura watches (line 41).
Figure 17.2f Tony manipulates the puzzle pieces (lines 54–59)
and Tony also takes the piece and returns it to where it was. He responds with
further, embodied counter-directives, persisting with exhibits of three-dimen-
sional manipulations of the puzzle pieces (Figure 17.2f and lines 54, 56, 58),
and rejecting her offer of help with the verbalization at line 59.
Extract 2c: Psychoeducational Profile “Cow” puzzle after Extract 2b

32 Lau: Try this one, over ↑her:e.
33 (4.0)
34 Lau: See look you got the cow’s ↑fa:c:e.
35 (1.0)
36 Lau: Try this one over her:e.
37 (1.2)
38 Tony: Watch::.
39 Lau: Oka:y I’ll ↑wa:tch.
40 (3.8)
41 Tony: ↑He opens the door::.
42 (1.0)
43 Lau: Uh hu:::h? You like open the ↑door:,=can you put that piece up
44 here?
45 (3.5) ((Tony shakes head in “no” gesture))
46 Lau: N-No doors. Put the piece where it goes.
47 (2.0)
48 Tony: Watch:.
49 Lau: No::? This piece goes up here.
50 (1.4)
51 Lau: We put that piece ov[er here
52 Tony: [↑Don’t help me::.
53 Lau: Then ↑you do it.
54 (16.4)
55 Lau: Did you make a co:::w?
56 (2.0)
57 Lau: Or do you need help.
58 (1.3)
59 Tony: I don’t need he::lp.
60 Lau: You ↑do::n’t. Oka::y.
61 (1.8)
62 Lau: Okay, hey you know what?
63 (1.0)
64 Lau: We’ve got a:nother puzzle here to ma:ke.
Finally, Laura gives up, closing the current activity and transitioning to a new
one (lines 62, 64).
As with Dan’s experience of announcing that he knows “how to learn to
drive,” we can wonder if Tony may have been successful with this exercise had
Laura continued with her so-far inadvertent relinquishing of control to him, as
in Extract 17.2a, and use of follow-in directives to guide him through assem-
bling the puzzle, as in 17.2a, lines 19–30 and 17.2c. Such an approach may have
facilitated Tony’s completion of the puzzle and provided for the particulariza-
tion of his diagnosis and treatment. The protocols also permit it—Tony, having
“partially” completed the puzzle (“at least two of the pieces are correctly placed”)
could have been scored on this item as showing “emerging” skills (Schopler and
Reichler 1979:28). According to the test instructions, it also was permissible
for the clinician to demonstrate the task. However, it is not our aim to second-
guess or critique Laura’s handling of the cow puzzle exercise. She was, overall,
following the directions for “Completing the Six-Piece Cow Puzzle” from the
Psychoeducational Profile, fully engaged in competent common-sense testing
as a form of assessment in the clinic. More generally, her reactions to Tony’s
noncompliance were in line with how anyone might deal with the violation of
assumptions surrounding the requirements of ordinary, common-sense con-
duct, whether inside or outside of the clinic per se.
Discussion
In the now vast literature on ASD, a focus on the disability as a property of the in-
dividual child is reflected in many ways. A prominent one has been the idea that
children with autism lack “theory of mind” or the capacity to infer the thoughts
or perspective of another person (e.g., Frith 2003:80). This position has been
subject to critique because, for example, it has “individualized the problem of so-
cial understanding,” pointing toward properties of mind or cognition to explain
conduct as if it occurred in a social vacuum (Leudar and Costall 2009:2, 12). In
the clinic, by minimizing the potential contributions both of test instrument de-
sign and their own practices to a child’s performances, clinicians contribute to
this individualizing process (Turowetz 2015a).
We have explored a further feature of this individualizing, which is the psy-
chologizing of disruption—seeing it as stemming from the motivational stance
of a child. Faced with lack of compliance withīn the common-sense order of
testing, there is an inherent inclination—a sense of “moral outrage,” as Heritage
(1984b:82) puts it in relation to Garfinkel’s (1967) demonstrations—to see such
conduct as either willful or deranged; the perpetrator is the “stranger,” or Other,
who “has to place in question what seems unquestionable to the in-group”
(Schütz 1944:499). In the two instances we analyzed (which represent a larger
collection), it is not so much that, during an examination, the child fails par-
ticular items, but rather that he withdraws from participation in the interac-
tional substrate that makes the completion of testing possible in the first place
(Maynard and Marlaire 1992). However, this withdrawal is not necessarily pur-
poseful or contrived, and instead is demonstrative of what can be construed as
among the “immensely various forms of reasoning” to which Garfinkel (1967:31)
originally called attention. It is strategic.
During Dan’s examination, accordingly, there was recurrent refusal to follow
what the clinician repeatedly asked him to do: demonstrating how to brush one’s
teeth. From the interior of the test, clinicians saw Dan as not wanting to do the
tooth-brushing demonstration. And retrospectively, the suggestion was that
Dan was feeling “put on the spot,” whereas his own sense could better be seen as
an inability skill-wise or performance-wise, rather than a matter of intention-
ality. In Tony’s testing, there was defiance regarding who could direct whom to
do what with the six-piece cow puzzle—that is, whether the task would involve
assembling a two-dimensional picture or engaging the pieces in a more tac-
tile, three-dimensional activity. Laura’s insistent efforts to align Tony to assem-
bling a picture tacitly suggest an orientation to motivating him, and her later
characterizations suggest she was unable to do this because of Tony’s struggles
for independence and, in the psychiatrist’s words, his emerging “pride.” In in-
teractional terms, however, it is apparent that he was oriented to an entirely
different course of action than what common-sense testing demanded. In the

clinical adherence to the common-sense order of testing, clinicians may treat
departures from that order as a practical matter of channeling the child’s interior
impulses (cf. Turowetz 2015b).
Further evidence of common-sense disruption, rather than simply non-per-
formance, is that the child’s conduct evokes emotional reactions on the part of
staff—“frustration” (extract 17.1d), impatience (“then you do it,” Extract 17.2d),
or even humor (in Tony’s pre-staffing), as exhibited in the production of laughter
“at” rather than “with” the child whose conduct is under review (cf. Glenn 1995;
Jefferson 1984). These features are consistent with Garfinkel’s (1963:226–27,
1967:51–54) explorations of how adherence to the strictures of common-sense
reasoning is a compelled matter, such that when adherence seems to be lacking—
as in the exercise when students were to act as “boarders” in their own homes,
family members could be stupefied and sought explanations “in terms of under-
standable and previous motives of the student”—the disruptions bring about var-
iously strong displays of affect, ranging from bemusement to anger and disgust.
Conclusion
Rather than questioning or second-guessing or critiquing the professionals in

our data or elsewhere in the clinical world, our purpose has been to show how
breaches of the order of testing get incorporated into forms of even trained
common sense or expertise. The point is not to undermine diagnosis as such,
but to call attention to features of children’s behavior that clinicians, with their
focus on deficits, may miss precisely because of their trained expertise, which at
best treats first-order competence as material for humorous anecdotes, or worse
as evidence of incompetence (cf. Turowetz and Maynard 2019). As Foucault
(1975:60–61, 166–67) has stated, it is as if the “clinical gaze” is one that deciphers
the name of a disorder rather than one that fully examines the individual child
(cf. Maynard and Turowetz 2022); there is much that the clinical gaze misses, but
that muchness falls outside of the domain of possible knowledge.
We have briefly mentioned what educators call individualized, forma-
tive assessments, as contrasted with summative ones based on comparative
performances (Erickson 2007; Heritage 2007).17 Going by analogy to educa-
tional testing, it may be possible to analyze testing and diagnosis at a level of gran-
ularity (cf. Heritage and Heritage 2013:188) that makes visible the practices of
common-sense talk and embodied conduct. The idea is not to suppress ordinary
practices, but to widen them to access first-order competence and autistic intelli-
gence as they exist in the “earthen” or interactional substrate of testing. Tending
to that substrate can mean describing its constitutive practices and a child’s
first-order competence for incorporation in clinical evaluation. Paying attention

to interactional detail, that is, can permit a different orientation to the particu-
larities of a child’s performance. Appreciation of such particularities could be
used, both instructively in situ and for recommendations to parents and others,
to enhance both the child and the environments in which the child exists as a so-
cial being.
First-order competence—skills, abilities, and claims that are off-record in
terms of gauging the second-order competence that tests formally measure
(Maynard and Marlaire 1992; Maynard and Turowetz 2017)—present opportu-
nities for clinicians, and ultimately caretakers, to follow the child’s indications
rather than the prerogatives of professionalized or everyday common sense. It
also provides opportunities to enter the child’s world, rather than evaluating the
child’s errant test performances solely by the standards of the neurotypical world,
according to which they are construed as incompetent. That is, close examina-
tion of the child’s “failures” can provide portals into their ways of sense-making,
which can then be used for diagnostic and treatment purposes. Inspecting osten-
sibly “incompetent” test performances can reveal the presence of first-order, fun-
damental competencies—“autistic intelligence”—where there initially appeared
to be only absences (i.e., of ability, etc.). And such inquiry, in turn, widens ethno-
methodological investigations, insofar as it means probing the reasoning behind
expressions that threaten common sense as much as the structural features of
common sense itself.
Finally, our inquiry is in line with Goodwin’s (2003a:7) proposal that work on
brain and other impairments “sheds light” on both the pragmatics of talk-in-in-
teraction and on “distinctive patterns of discourse” that arise when those with
such impairments are included in local forms of sociality. By now, a plethora
of ethnomethodological (e.g., Goode 1984; Robillard 1999) and conversation
analytic investigations18 involving atypical interactions has shown how local
ecologies can be reorganized to allow for the successful accomplishment of col-
laborative courses of interaction. That this can also happen in the context of
clinical standardized testing is what formative inquiry in educational settings
suggests.
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Notes
Chapter 1
1. Garfinkel later became disenchanted with the “documentary method” as a working

research term, characterizing it as “a convenient gloss for the work of local,
retrospective-prospective, proactively evolving ordered phenomenal details of seri-
ality, sequence, repetition, comparison, generality, and other structures” and as “con-
venient and somehow convincing”(Garfinkel 1996:18). The notion lost its place as
ethnomethodology/CA studies became more technical and exacting.
2. As Schegloff (2006:88) remarks, “As with virtually everything in talk in interaction, it
is a matter of position and composition—how the talk is constructed and where it is.”
3. The citations supplied in this sentence are merely entry points for, in some cases, vast
literatures.
4. See Sacks (1972b).
5. See Potter and Edwards’s (2003) reply, and Coulter’s (2004) rejoinder.
6. See also Schegloff (2007b).
7. After Everett Hughes left Chicago for Brandeis University, Robert Emerson became
his student, working also with Egon Bittner. Joining the faculty at UCLA in 1969,
Emerson increasingly incorporated ethnomethodological perspectives in his ethno-
graphic work, particularly by way of his friendship with Melvin Pollner. On this, see
Katz (2015:x), and also, for example, Pollner and Emerson (2007), as well as Emerson’s
(2015) ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography of Everyday Troubles.
8. For more recent treatments of the relationship between ethnomethodology and sym-
bolic interactionism (SI), see Maynard and Clayman (2003), and for the possible
relationships between ethnomethodology and pragmatism (a field that underlies SI),
see Emirbayer and Maynard (2011).
9. However, Garfinkel came to be dissatisfied with what he calls “ethnographic re-
portage” in his own early ethnomethodological work. See his “Sources of Issues and
Ways of Working,” Chapter 5 in this volume.
10. See also Bittner (1967a, 1967b), Cicourel (1968), Hilbert (1981), Sudnow (1965), and
others.
11. For a related critique of role theory, see Hilbert (1981).
12. In many places, Garfinkel (2002:187) discusses “Lebenswelt pairs,” and in
Ethnomethodology’s Program, he cites Livingston’s book as having specified the matter
and goes on to describe the features of such pairs (Garfinkel and Rawls 2002:188–90).
13. A recent publication (Garfinkel 2019) from the Garfinkel Archive suggests that the
studies of work orientation may have its predecessors in Garfinkel’s pre-dissertation,
wartime research appointment with the US Army Air Corps in 1942. The study’s
478 Notes
purpose was to develop training protocols for mechanics to perform aircraft main-
tenance duties for cargo planes. Often the trainees were lacking education, had occu-
pational experiences (farming, baking, teaching, construction) unrelated to airplane
mechanics, were without real engines to work on, adequate equipment, and basic
tools such as screwdrivers. Classroom lectures and instruction did not help with the
hands-on work of maintenance. Trainees were provided with “mock-ups” or models
meant to illustrate how the machinery would look in situ, and what manipulations
would be needed. However, these models were of limited use for configuring main-
tenance as actual embodied tasks. The ways in which Garfinkel’s study anticipates
later concerns with what he called the shop floor problem, instructed action, and hy-
brid studies of work are developed insightfully in Rawls and Lynch’s (2019) intro-
duction to the Gulfport Field study, which suggests the possibility for a re-reading
of the genealogy of ethnomethodology different from the usually cited influences of
Parsons, Schutz, Gurwitsch, and related others. That is, Garfinkel’s identification of
phenomena associated with bricolage, hands-on work, improvisation, and order in
detail is already present in the heavily ethnographic Gulfport Field history of 1942.
14. Garfinkel’s approach to the assembly of suicide statistics reaches back to earlier
studies of homicide, discussed earlier in this chapter. See also Cicourel (1964).
15. Here, we are distinguishing more strictly ethnomethodological studies from studies
involving “membership categories” and “membership categorization devices,” which
were discussed earlier.
Chapter 2
1. Unless otherwise specified, the positions attributed to these men is either taken di-
rectly from or is based on the following writings. For Talcott Parsons: The Structure of
Social Action, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1937; Actor, Situation, and Normative Pattern,
unpublished manuscript, 1939; Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied, The
Free Press, 1949, especially Chapters I, II, III, and IV; The Social System, The Free Press,
1951; Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils: Toward a General Theory of Action, Harvard
University Press, 1951; especially Part I, Chapter I, and Part 2; Max Weber: The
Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Oxford University Press, especially the
Introduction.
For Alfred Schütz: Der Sinnhafte Aufbau Der Sozialen Welt, Verlag von Julius
Springer, Wien, 1932; “The Problem of Rationality in the Social World,” Economica,
Vol. X, May, 1943, 130– 149; “Phenomenology and the Social Sciences,” in
Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, edited by Marvin Farber,
Harvard University Press, 1940, pp. 164–186; “Language, Language Disturbances
and the Texture of Consciousness,” Social Research, Vol. 17, September, 1950,
pp. 365–394; “Sartre’s Theory of the Alter Ego,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, Vol. IX, December, 1948, pp. 181–199; “On Multiple Realities,” Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, Vol. V, June, 1945, pp. 533–575; “Choosing among
Notes 479
Projects of Action,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XII, December,

1951, 161–184; “Common-Sense and Scientific Model Constructs of Human Action
and the Concept of Rationality,” mimeographed paper prepared for and presented at
the Organizational Behavior Project Conference on “Problems in Model Construction
in the Social Sciences,” March 15–16, 1952, Princeton University.
2. Farber, Marvin, The Foundation of Phenomenology, Harvard University Press, 1943.
3. The term “correspondence theory” is borrowed from and follows the usage of
Felix Kaufman in his book, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Oxford University
Press, 1944.
4. Kaufman distinguishes between the correspondence theory and the coherence theory
and then shows what must be done to make a coherence theory more adequate. We
have rather arbitrarily and without knowing better used the term “congruence theory”
to refer to the “adequate coherence theory” that Kaufman advocates.
5. “Mere actuality” means only and nothing more than that the sensory signals are ex-
perienced as signifying only themselves. There is no sense either intended nor im-
plied that sensory materials are merely actual while something else is to be preferred.
That sensory signals of temperature variations are constantly impinging on the bodily
receptors and that the body is constantly responding to those can be demonstrated by
simply matching the two systems. But that these signals are without meaning is the
point that is underlined. That is, the person may not be responding to them in terms
of his interpretation of them is the point being referred to. Nor is it necessary that the
person be “aware” of his interpretation.
6. You’ll find that the following analysis of the consequences goes in quick and dirty
fashion. I ask, therefore, that you consider the analysis as a point of departure for fur-
ther elaboration during the seminar meeting.
Chapter 3
1. The words Self, Black, Jew, Race, Gender, Transsexual, Transgender, and Other are cap-
italized here to indicate that they are names for social facts and not natural or biolog-
ical states. Trust is also capitalized to indicate that it names the prerequisites for social
fact-making and not a state of the person.
2. There was a collaboration between Garfinkel and Goffman in 1962 to publish
Stigma and the “Agnes” chapter together in a book that was to be titled “On Passing.”
Garfinkel got the new material on Agnes that would appear in the appendix to Studies
in Ethnomethodology about a month before publication. He told Goffman to find out
whether the publisher would go ahead with a monograph on Stigma. If not, then if
Goffman would wait Garfinkel would be ready. The publisher was happy to go ahead,
and so the book Stigma was published alone by Goffman.
3. Early correspondence with Tamotsu Shibutani in the Garfinkel Archive shows that
Goffman was giving Shibutani early drafts of Garfinkel’s work and that Shibutani had
sent at least one early draft of his own work to Garfinkel with the comment that his
ideas had been inspired by Garfinkel.
480 Notes
4. See note 8.
5. Garfinkel undertook this adventure on advice from a Quaker instructor at the
University of Newark on how to make connections with students from outside the
Newark Jewish community. It was students at this camp who told him about the pro-
gram at North Carolina under Odum.
6. Unknown to Garfinkel at the time, the incident involved Pauli Murray, a well-known
feminist civil rights activist. To complicate matters, Murray was secretly a cross-
dressing female—identified by Garfinkel as an adolescent boy. Garfinkel’s descrip-
tion of Murray as a “boy” is consistent with his discussion of Agnes (a Transgendered
person) as a woman. Murray “presented” as a boy—and hoped to be seen as a boy.
Garfinkel obliged. But this apparently upset the civil rights activists who objected
to his description of Murray. Garfinkel considered the successful performance of
Gender to settle the question. In this he was ahead of his time. That Garfinkel “mis-
took” Murray for a boy is not an “error” in his analysis. It was due to her own success in
presenting herself as a boy and consistent with his later analysis of Agnes (which has
also been misunderstood). Murray—performing successfully as a boy—was a boy.
It is interesting to note, however, that in his description Garfinkel refers to the “boy”
as “flat chested,” which suggests he may have been sensitive to some Transgender as-
pect of the presentation. Murray recognized Garfinkel’s description of the incident
while still in jail and the article has become associated with Murray’s arrest in the
history of the civil rights movement. Glenda Gilmore (2008) wrote about it in Defying
Dixie, taking Garfinkel to task for not being clear that the incident was true (likely be-
cause it was reprinted in 1941 and 1945 without his knowledge as fiction). Rosalind
Rosenberg (2017), a civil rights historian, focused on discrepancies between the
accounts of Garfinkel and Murray. Murray’s account can be found in the Harvard
University Schlesinger archive.
7. Garfinkel’s admission to North Carolina is a case in point. When he showed up on
Odum’s doorstep, having hitchhiked from Georgia, he reports Odum saying, “You are
a Jew from Newark come to the South. I admit you.”
8. The 1940s were a time of profound anti-Semitism in sociology. In his 1943 Presidential
Address to the ASA, Lundberg explicitly named Jews as the problem with sociology
because they were interested in social justice (Lundberg 1944). Others strongly iden-
tified sociology with Christianity (Madge 1962). Lewis Coser (1975), in his 1974 pres-
idential address to the ASA, criticized Garfinkel with reference to the Bible, referring
to his students and colleagues as apostles. During the war, Jewish sociologists and so-
cial philosophers fled to America from Europe. The country may have provided a safe
haven from Hitler, but it was not welcoming to Jews. Heims (1991:49) cites a letter
written on behalf of a Jewish faculty member at Harvard protesting his dismissal in
1943 that is instructive. In defense of this Jewish scholar, the letter says he “has a Jewish
name but his Jewish ancestry is remote. He has none of the unpleasant characteris-
tics sometimes associated with the Jew.” Garfinkel came out of Newark with a cohort
of Jewish friends and they were the ones who finally got him the job at UCLA. The
striking lack of recognition of Garfinkel from the “recorders” of disciplinary history
may well have racial overtones.
Notes 481
9. Garfinkel’s (1956) research on degradation ceremonies explored a ritual (court

martial) in which inequality is achieved via a symmetrical relationship in which
those being degraded are full members of the community and are participants in
the assignment of a new category, the rules and processes of which they are com-
mitted to.
10. This card—which is referred to several different times—is obviously Garfinkel’s.
11. For instance, the fact that Black men were and are in general more likely to be arrested
means that in court cases holding “other factors” (such as prior arrest) constant
creates racially biased conviction and sentencing rates that nevertheless appear to be
racially unbiased.
12. There are five additional papers from the year 1946–1947, organized by Garfinkel into
a black spring binder. Two of these papers bear the dates January 13, 1946 and August
30, 1946. Taken together with the three papers discussed in this section, the eight
papers correspond to sections of his dissertation proposals (there were at least five)
of 1948.
13. Personal communication with Jerome Bruner in New York City, 2011.
14. Notes for a course Garfinkel took with Bruner at Harvard confirm this source.
15. Although it is not mentioned in the book published by the project team (Smith,
Bruner, and White 1956), in the Garfinkel Archive this manuscript is accompanied by
a lengthy set of Brewster Smith’s comments, so he had read it.
Chapter 4
1. The idea that ethnomethodology is an “improbable sociology” was used in the title for
a meeting “Ethnomethodology, an Improbable Sociology?” held in 1997 at Cerisy-la-
Salle, Normandy. The published volume from the meeting substituted “radical” for
“improbable” in the title (Ogien, Fornel, and Quéré 2001).
2. When Garfinkel proposed to make a radical break from previous sociological and
ethnomethodological studies, including his own studies, he did not abandon the
major themes developed in Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), such as indexicality,
reflexivity, and accountability, and he drew upon materials from research that he had
begun years and decades earlier. He also deployed pedagogical exercises and equip-
ment such as inverting lenses, which he had used for many years for disrupting, and
thus revealing, the coherence and coordination of embodied actions (Garfinkel
2002:207ff.). To put it very succinctly, Garfinkel’s “radical” program, which Arminen
(2008) distinguishes from “scientific” ethnomethodology and Wilson (2012)
distinguishes from the “classical” ethnomethodology represented in Garfinkel’s re-
search up until around 1962, severed any residual links with traditions of interpretive
social science. Garfinkel eschewed the use of “formal analysis” in studies of practical
actions; analysis that posits tacit rules and underlying orders, deploys mechanical
analogies, and/or administers theoretical and methodological constructs. And, via
the unique adequacy requirement, he insisted that the grounds of adequate social
482 Notes
analysis must be “discovered” within the competent performance of ordinary and

specialized activities. Arminen (2008), Wilson (2012), and also Pollner (2012) align
with the interpretive and reflexive explications of common sense reasoning they find
in Garfinkel’s earlier work, and for different reasons they disavow his “radical” pro-
gram. Although their appreciation of what Garfinkel was proposing to do is limited,
they are correct that it is incompatible with an autonomous academic discipline of
sociology (see Lynch 2019).
3. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles was a reference source that listed thousands of
job descriptions compiled by the US Department of Labor. It has been replaced by an
online source, The Occupation Information Network.
4. Garfinkel does not refer to a particular publication of Becker’s, but an example would
be Becker (1951). Singling out Becker as a foil here was not the most grateful or
graceful of gestures. Schütz’s (1951) essay, “Making Music Together,” would be no less
liable to the charge of missing the “what” of music in favor of a philosophical discus-
sion of intersubjectivity. Becker, himself an accomplished jazz musician, had acted as
an ally and supportive colleague of Garfinkel’s and of Sudnow’s at various times be-
fore and after Garfinkel wrote the passage. See, for example, how Becker mediated the
deep disagreements between the ethnomethodologists and quantitative sociologists
in the transcribed discussion in The Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology (Hill
and Crittenden 1968). He also was editor of Social Problems when Garfinkel’s (1964)
article, “Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities,” was published. The
article later appeared as Chapter 2 of Garfinkel (1967).
5. A point that is not often appreciated in social studies of science is that Mannheim’s
sociology of knowledge did not limit itself to subject matter marked as erroneous, but
instead required some manner of demonstration that the knowledge being explained
was not absolute, did not fully account for proponents’ adherence to it, and remained
subject to contestation. The “new” sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) often
used skeptical philosophical arguments, combined with empirical demonstrations of
disagreements among practitioners, to establish the “interpretative flexibility” neces-
sary for gaining an explanatory foothold for SSK (as an example, see Collins [1985];
for discussion on this point, see Lynch [1993:41ff]).
6. In a critical commentary on the Strong Programme, Coulter (1989) points out that
the ordinary terms “knowledge” and “belief ” cannot so easily be equated, even for
methodological purposes.
7. The initial wave of laboratory ethnographies included Knorr Cetina (1981), Lynch
(1985), and Traweek (1988). For an early review of laboratory studies, see Knorr
Cetina (1983).
8. See Doing (2008) for a relatively recent review of laboratory studies that makes the
point that little has been done in recent decades to critically examine and follow
through in detail on the broad claims, repeatedly made in early laboratory studies, to
the effect that science is thoroughly penetrated by society, culture, and politics.
9. In several places in his Reassembling the Social, Latour (2005) acknowledges Garfinkel
and Gabriel Tarde as the most significant progenitors for his post-humanist recon-
ception of sociology.
Notes 483
10. The discussion of “analytic ethnography” in Garfinkel et al. (1988; Garfinkel

2022: 26–29) took the form of a comparison between my own laboratory study (Lynch
1985) and Livingston’s (1986) account of mathematical proving, though Garfinkel in-
cluded caveats to warn readers against assuming that his stated “dissatisfactions” with
the former text and assignment of “virtues” to the latter was an invidious compar-
ison. Garfinkel reminded readers that the very same text in which he presented the
comparison, which also included an original account of themes in laboratory work
(“coathangers” on which stories could be hung), was itself an instance of analytic
ethnography.
11. Consistent with this approach, Garfinkel envisioned a series of “manuals” on “natu-
rally organized ordinary activities.”
12. As an indication of this lack of interplay, a textbook on institutional talk (Heritage
and Clayman 2010) does not cover ethnomethodological studies of work, and the
introduction to an edited volume of ethnomethodological studies of work briefly
mentions that, with all due respect for the excellence of conversation analysis, the in-
stitutional talk program would not be covered in the volume (Rouncefield and Tolmie
2011:12). This is not to say that studies of work inspired by Garfinkel’s program ig-
nore conversation analytic procedures and findings (see the volume edited by Dupret,
Lynch, and Berard 2015), and some conversation analytic studies draw upon themes
from Garfinkel’s program (see, for example, Maynard and Schaeffer 2000).
13. In the late 1980s, Garfinkel circulated various drafts of an unpublished manuscript
(Garfinkel et al. 1988; edited and published posthumously as Garfinkel 2022, Part I).
Although the text originally was prepared as a chapter for Boden and Zimmerman’s
(1991) volume, it was not included in that volume, perhaps because of its length of
more than 160 pages. Garfinkel listed coauthors on the title pages of several of the
many versions of that paper, though the lists varied from draft to draft. Clearly, the
work was his, and the coauthors were former students and colleagues who did not
directly contribute to the writing, except in the case of Douglas Macbeth, whose essay
on the embodied play of basketball was included as an appendix of the 1988 draft, and
later was published separately (Macbeth 2012). The 1988 draft, which was the most
widely circulated version, was bound with a blue cover, and some of us dubbed it “the
blue book”—as a humorous allusion to Wittgenstein’s Blue Book, though in this case
the text was written by Garfinkel rather than being reconstructed from student notes.
14. The asterisks placed after “detail” and “details” are Garfinkel’s way of marking what he
sometimes called “tendentious” usage—to highlight that a peculiar sense of the term
was in play, but just how it was in play would only become apparent through further
reading (if at all). See Garfinkel (2022, Part I, Appendix 3).
15. Face-to-face interaction, together with writing, phone calls, and many other forms
of communication, is a relentless part of the day’s work in many service jobs and
professions. When such work involves interactions between professional and lay
parties and is accountable to lay audiences (such as in courtroom interrogations, jury
instructions, diagnostic sessions between doctors and patients, and so forth), the work
appears to be transparently achieved in and through the talk, and thus analyzable as
specialized applications of generic ways of talking. And there can be sound reasons
484 Notes
for addressing how such talk may be, or should be, accountable to patients, jurors, or
clients. But formal structures of institutional talk, or even generic features of visuali-
zation in science, medicine, and other fields (Goodwin 1994, 1995; Koschmann et al.
2011; Lynch 1991; Mondada 2003), are not what Garfinkel was after in his, perhaps
quixotic, pursuit of the “just what” constitutes the distinctive competencies through
which legal relevancies and evidences are achieved, discoveries are established, or
possible diagnostic evidences are explored and tested. His aim (or, rather, his hope)
was that uniquely adequate “hybrid” studies would become contributions to the fields
with which the studies engaged, in addition to adding to the literatures in sociology,
sociolinguistics, and ethnomethodology/conversation analysis.
16. On the question of whether this presumption is in play in a given case, compare
Suchman and Jordan (1990) with Maynard and Schaeffer (2000).
Chapter 5
1. Editors’ note: See Sudnow (1978).

2. Editors’ note: See, for instance, Becker (1951).
3. See taped sessions with Howard Schwartz, February 1974, on analysts’ devices.
4. Editors’ note: For discussion of local production and local production cohorts,
see Garfinkel (2002:7, 248). See also the discussion of the Mooersian Catalog and
Zatocoding in Garfinkel (2002:125–29).
5. Editors’ note: Later in this chapter, these phenomena are discussed further. For other
considerations on service lines and queues, see Garfinkel and Livingston (1996); on
turn taking, see Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974); and on manuals and maps, see
Garfinkel (2002:129–30, 205).
6. Editors’ note: See Cicourel (1963, 1968).
7. Editors’ note: For a publication that eventuated, see Garfinkel and Livingston (2003).
8. See folder on “note” in cardboard box for more. See also lecture notes for first lecture
148 Winter-73–74, Normal Environments for more notes.
9. Add to these with notes for Soc. 149 4/8 & 4/10/75 and taped lectures.
Chapter 6
1. The Golden City Police Department outlines these exceptions: “The law . . . does not
apply to any person: (1) sitting or lying on the sidewalk due to a medical emergency;
(2) using a wheelchair, walker or similar device as a result of a disability, (3) operating
or patronizing a commercial establishment conducted on a public sidewalk under a
sidewalk use permit; (4) participating in or attending a parade, festival, performance,
rally, demonstration, meeting or similar event conducted on a sidewalk under and in
compliance with a street use or other applicable permit; (5) sitting on a fixed chair or
bench supplied by a public agency or abutting private property owner; (6) sitting in
Notes 485
line for goods or services if not impeding pedestrians from using the sidewalk or en-
tering a door or other entrance along the sidewalk; (7) who is a child in a stroller; and
(8) in an area designated as a Pavement to Parks project” (Golden City Police Code
Article 2 § 168 (D) (2010)).
2. We add “chronic” as a modifier of “homeless” because persons who are only tempo-
rarily homeless may live in cars, move between the houses of friends and relatives, or
stay briefly in shelters, and thus may not live for sustained periods on the street in the
way that chronically homeless residents do (e.g., with their sleeping bags and other be-
longings). Thus, when members of the public refer to the “homeless” they are typically
referring to chronically homeless persons.
3. The Golden City Police Department outlines these penalties: “A first offense is an in-
fraction and could result in a citation. If that citation results in a conviction, the pen-
alty is a fine between $50–100 and/or community service. If someone violates the law
again, within 24 hours of receiving a citation, the person is guilty of a misdemeanor.
The penalty for a conviction increases, to a fine between $300–500, and/or community
service, and/or up to 10 days in County Jail. If someone violates the law within 120
days of a conviction, that offense is also a misdemeanor, and the penalty for a convic-
tion is a fine between $400–500, and/or community service, and/or up to 30 days im-
prisonment in County Jail.”
4. As written, the CSO also applies to every person in the city. In practice, however, po-
lice officers and members of the public treat the ordinance as applying specifically to
homeless persons. For example, patterns of enforcement adopted by the GCPD are
specifically sensitive to the daily routines of homeless residents, and persons who
claim they should not be subject to its provisions typically do so by claiming that
they are not homeless. A news article on the law quotes the experience of one res-
ident of the city, “Thirty-one-year-old Derrick Gomez has lived in Golden City on
and off for the past seven years. He recently came back to the [Park neighborhood]
and says it only took a few days to encounter an officer. ‘I was sitting down talking
to a kid, I was having my coffee,’ he says. ‘It was literally breakfast—7:30, 8 a.m.—
just kneeled down to talk to a kid. A cop just happened to roll up, just assumes that
I’m homeless and whatnot.’ ” (http://kalw.org/post/how-effective-are-sitlie-laws#str
eam/0). As this quote suggests, members of the public treat being subject to enforce-
ment of the CSO as category bound to a person’s status as homeless (see Sacks 1992;
Schegloff 2007).
Chapter 7
1. See Goodwin and Goodwin (1987) for more detailed analysis of such format tying or
dialogic syntax (Du Bois 2014).
2. Conversation analysts note that turns-at-talk that are NOT to be heard as tied to the
utterance they follow (from the perspective of the present argument as not to be ana-
lyzed as operations on the current local substrate) characteristically begin with an ex-
plicit misplacement marker (Sacks and Schegloff 1973).
486 Notes
3. Note the extraordinary lecture by Harvey Sacks (1995:716–21) on Tying Techniques.

4. For other recent analysis of how action is built through the simultaneous use of dif-
ferent kinds of semiotic resources, see Agha (2007), Barth-Weingarten, Reber, and
Selting (2010), Enfield (2009), Heath et al. (2010), Hindmarsh and Pilnick (2007),
Kendon (2009), Mondada (2009), and the papers in Streeck et al. (2011).
5. Thus Levinson (2012) argues that what action is assigned to a turn “is revealed by the
response of a next speaker.”
6. Fritjof Sahlström, acting in the capacity of anonymous reviewer of this chapter,
noted how what Chil does when he decomposes the action provided him by Pat
demonstrates crucial limitations to the notion of lamination as presented, without
however denying its relevance. Fritjof notes that the model of lamination as origi-
nally presented is most appropriate to layers glued together to form a rigid, stable
structure, such as a surfboard. Once built, such a structure is difficult to disassemble.
However, as demonstrated by the phenomena now being examined, “for human so-
ciality the lamination is constantly and contingently moving, running along in vast
resourceful fields of semiotic substrates. What is attended to are these possibilities
for assembling resources, rather than the resources themselves. The assembled whole
not only provides itself as a whole, but as something constituted by recognizable
layers, which then are available for further elaboration by any participant. The social
resin is more like the glue on the back of a Post-It than the kind of resin used when
using fiberglass; it holds enough (and very reliably so) for its situated purposes, but
once passed, it is easily removed, and what it held is no longer pre-configured.” I am
in complete agreement with this most insightful analysis. Operating on what I wrote
as a substrate, Fritjof improves my argument.
7. I have also published this argument about layered structure of human action in
Goodwin (2010a). I am including it here as well because I think it provides very im-
portant components of the larger argument being made in the current chapter, and
that this generalizes what was argued before.
8. See Goodwin (2007a) for more extensive discussion of environmentally coupled
gestures, including this sequence.
9. See the discussion of chains of inscriptions in Latour and Woolgar (1979).
10. However, see the extraordinary of work of Anne E. Russon (2004) with ex-captive
orangutans being rehabilitated for release to free forest life, where phenomena such as
compound tools are observed.
11. See Goodwin (2010b) for more detailed examination of this sequence.
Chapter 8
1. Garfinkel used the terms “sex,” “sex status,” and “sexual” in instances where sociologists
would now typically use “gender” and “gender identity.”
2. Sociologist Raewyn Connell (2009) argues that Agnes’s case carries a canonical status in
sociology that is comparable to Freud’s case study of “the Wolf Man” in psychoanalysis.
Notes 487
3. I am indebted to Anne Rawls for her generosity in providing access to these materials.
4. The term “passing” had been in colloquial use since the nineteenth century to refer to
racial minorities in America who were able to live and work as white (see Hobbs 2014
for a detailed history). Garfinkel adopted a sociological understanding of “passing”
as a general social process whereby members of a marginalized or oppressed mi-
nority seek to escape persecution or discrimination by “losing their identity with the
minority and becoming absorbed into the majority” (Burma 1946:18). While Erving
Goffman (1963) used this concept in a similar way in Stigma, Garfinkel adopted it first
in a 1960 article he coauthored with Stoller (Stoller, Garfinkel, and Rosen 1960).
5. Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna (1978:155) would later transform this insight
into their concept of “cultural genitals,” “the one[s]‌assumed to exist and which, it is
believed, should be there” on the basis of a person’s appearance.
6. While early sociologists of gender, such as Mirra Komarovsky and Alice Rossi,
and second wave activists, such as Betty Friedan, critiqued the classist and sexist
assumptions embedded in this functionalist perspective, a narrow analytic focus on
sex roles persisted in sociology well into the 1980s (Fuchs-Epstein 1988).
7. Simone De Beauvoir had made such an analytic split much earlier in The Second Sex
with her now-famous line, “One is not born but rather becomes a woman” (Meyerowitz
2002). Sexologist John Money also championed a split between sex and gender, though
his definition did not gain the same prominence as that of Stoller (Goldie 2014).
8. A similar passage is included in his 1967 chapter on page 183–184. However, he tem-
pered his critique, as he attributes this critique to Agnes’s worldview, rather than
his own.
Chapter 9
1. Pollner’s critique of Becker anticipated by over a decade Woolgar and Pawluch’s (1985)
critique of what they called “ontological gerrymandering,” or the strategically selec-
tive commitment to both a radical constructionism and orthodox objectivism. For
a sample of the debates that ensued among social constructionist theorists of social
problems concerning ontological gerrymandering, see Holstein and Miller (1993),
Schneider (2019) and Weinberg (2014:113–33). For a recent discussion of Pollner’s
continuing relevance to social constructionist debates about social problems, see
Crawley (2019).
Chapter 10
1. Later we address Sacks’s decision to focus on the analysis of individual social actions
rather than common-sense knowledge or reasoning, his investigation of sequences of
action both for capturing the orderly temporal unfolding of talk, and as a method for
488 Notes
grounding analytic claims in the displayed orientations of the participants themselves,

and the use of specimen collections as a method of charting the generality and scope of
the practices underlying the organization of social action.
2. We take this paper as representing Garfinkel’s perspective, based on Sacks’s re-
peated disclaimers of significant coauthorship reported in Schegloff (1992a:xlix) and
Coulter (2016) and as reflected in a footnote (fn. 40) in Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson
(1974:727) which attributes sole authorship of the paper to Garfinkel. As Wilson
(2012:231) notes, the paper contains an unresolved tension between Garfinkel’s and
Sacks’s stances on indexical expressions.
3. Goffman eventually developed an interest in talk and recorded data, but this did
not emerge until much later (Goffman 1981) and was plainly stimulated by the ad-
vance of CA.
4. These practices are now analyzed under the general heading of “next turn repair initia-
tion” (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977).
5. These characteristics of disagreeing (or dispreferred) responses are now very fully
documented, (e.g., Heritage 2015; Kendrick and Torreira 2015).
6. For a range of perspectives on the creation and uses of collections, see Robinson et al.
(in prep).
Chapter 11
1. The use of the asterisk (*) refers to order as a member’s phenomenon and ordinary
achievement “as the most ordinary achieved organizational thing[s]‌in the world”
(Garfinkel 2002:117), and therefore treated as a topic to be investigated, rather than a
notion theorized by the analyst.
2. See http://www.mpi.nl/corpus/html/elan/index.html.
Chapter 12
1. How the natural sciences can be understood as “discovering sciences” is demon-

strated in this chapter, not because the chapter aims at promoting this demonstra-
tion as a philosophical position, but because the analyzed course of experimental
work exhibited this kind of understanding itself (see also Garfinkel et al. 1981, 1989).
Conversely, as Michael Lynch pointed out, “[constructivist] studies [did] not empiri-
cally demonstrate that ‘scientific facts are constructed,’ since this [was] assumed from
the outset” (Lynch 1993:102).
2. Augustine Brannigan (1980:560) distinguished between “discover[ies] which consti-
tute [a]‌ factual accumulation [ . . . ] and [discoveries which may lead to] theoretical
innovation.” Multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8 would be a discovery of the
former kind (a “novelty”), while single-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8 might
Notes 489
have been one of the latter kind (an “anomaly”). In this respect, we may note that the
positive bias toward potential theoretical innovation, rather than actual empirical
discovery (what Brannigan calls “simple factual discovery”), has been particularly
common among philosophers of science (Hacking 1983:149–50).
3. While the “pulsar paper” acknowledged the Gestalt character of the astronomical
discovery in analogical terms (as a progressively shaped “potter’s object,” Garfinkel
et al. 1981), it did not describe the “functional significance” of the successive
procedures, in and for the discovery’s local production. In turn, the present “spec-
trum chapter” makes explicit the heuristic interest of reflexive re-enactment, in and
for the video analysis of experimental physics and the local production of (one of) its
current discoveries.
4. A Jefferson-style transcription notation is used in the following. Additionally, the
onset of nonverbal activity is indicated by one sign per participant (see also Mondada,
Chapter 11 in this volume). If there is a verbal line, the onset of activity is marked on
the verbal line and again on the comment line, as in the following example:
T: here |I let you have a look.
|((hands the magnifier to the student))
In turn, double square brackets, [[ ]‌], have been used in the bulk of the text to indi-
cate that the mentioned tasks were devised as part of a [tip-sample approach] proce-
dure. On the analytic use of brackets, see Garfinkel and Sacks (1970); see also Lynch
(1993:289–90). Finally, I have circled the phenomena of manifest interest to the ex-
perimentalist and, whenever judged necessary, added schematic drawings to indicate
them (see the lower right corner of film stills in question).
5. I did not manage to ask this question in situ, let alone to have it answered right away.
Indeed, once Pete had formulated one task, he was already engaging in the next one,
leaving me at least with two questions and no slot to have them raised. For further
analysis along these lines, see Sormani (2014:201–211).
6. As Pete would open the “approach” window of the STM interface on his computer
screen to launch the [[automatic approach]] of tip and sample, he would open the
“spectro” window to prepare his subsequent [local spectroscopies]. In particular, this
window presented him with a grid view of the sample surface, allowing him to position
the tip in various corners of the sample, just prior to its spectroscopic inspection in the
selected position.
7. Having been used during prior topography to scan the sample surface, the “topo filter”
is useless for spectroscopy—worse: it renders spectroscopy impossible, as it filters out
the signal of physical interest. This was Pete’s answer to one of my later transcript-re-
lated questions.
8. The “double gap” displayed in the “spectro” window, in contrast to a “single gap,” would
be taken as the decisive indication of multi-band superconductivity in PbMo6S8. As
Pete put it subsequently to the transcribed episode, “now I know it’s true, the physical
model in there is true.” For a detailed analysis of this formulated confirmation and its
sequential context, see Sormani (2011).
490 Notes
9. Similar patterns of celebration are to be observed on the football pitch, at the very
moment a goal is about to be scored. Exploring the possible connection between
Pete’s “primary socialization” as an amateur football player and his manifest expertise
in experimental physics is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, I observed Pete
watching a Premier League game of soccer, once he had finished his [local spectros-
copy] that Sunday morning of November 9, 2008.
10. Or a double m-shaped curve (the so-called double gap) since a “multi-band” super-
conductor was (or appears to have been) successfully probed, as in the case of the
local spectroscopy of PbMo6S8. For a tentatively technical explication of the graphi-
cally displayed equation, see Sormani (2014:26–32).
Chapter 13
1. This was a continuous refrain in Garfinkel’s work: e.g., “Ethnomethodological

studies are not directed to formulating or arguing correctives. . . . Although
they are directed to the preparation of manuals on sociological methods, these
are in no way supplements to ‘standard’ procedure, but are distinct from them”
(1967:vii). “Caution! . . . Ethnomethodology is not challenging the social science
movement’s claims” (2002:68). “Ethnomethodology is not critical of formal ana-
lytic investigations” (2002:114). “[Ethnomethodology] is not claiming to know
better” (2002:123).
2. Although even nominally more sympathetic commentators can sound equally dis-
paraging: “In the social sciences, [researchers typically] . . . begin by going off to rum-
mage around in some kind of literature to see what they might come up with. Even
when social scientists claim they know what they’re doing, it’s still fundamental to
much even of the best social research that one has to feel one’s way in, sometimes
without knowing what one’s research object, even one’s actual field, is. Natural
scientists are often visibly horrified at this way of proceeding” (Osborne 2013:85).
3. In Benzecry’s ([2015] 2017:6) summary rendition: “we are always bound to be
subjects of our own context and—to a certain extent—blind to it.”
4. Garfinkel’s point here is that it is always possible to recover something from a study
no matter what the problems, and, as he noted, the rescue process can continue well
into the process of writing up results for a professional audience (1967:94–103). What
is involved? Teplitskiy’s (2016) recent empirical study of “how quantitative sociolog-
ical articles change during peer review” is useful here. By examining what happens to
papers as they move from presentation at conferences to publication in prestigious
journals, Teplitskiy shows that weaknesses in studies as revealed in peer review are
addressed either by altering the theoretical, methodological, or analytical framing of
the work and/or by changing the data used. Even in quantitative work, then, “what
we did and what we found out” (Garfinkel 2002) are revisable matters right up to the
point of publication, rather than a logical iron cage rigidly defining links between
world, data, method, and theory in advance of a study beginning. What a study might
Notes 491
be said to be, to have involved, or to have shown is therefore not fixed but mutable, and
necessarily so: without the ad hoc adjustments, researchers would have no phenomena
to exhibit.
5. Here is Garfinkel (1967:8–9): “When I propose that members are ‘not interested’ . . . ,
I do not mean that members will have none, a little, or a lot of it. That they are ‘not
interested’ has to do with reasonable practices, with plausible argument, and with rea-
sonable findings. . . . [T]‌hough they would, they can have none of it.”
6. It is not that the statistical operations are irrelevant: far from it, it is the strength of that
work which would be assessed by the professional audiences to whom it would ulti-
mately be directed. Nonetheless, those evaluations would also take for granted what
is known in common as the parameters within which judgments could be made about
the work’s social scientific qualities, i.e., whether it could be adjudged to offer a reason-
able account of what we all already know about the social world.
7. The entire research project had to take place in the period between successive waves
of the annual longitudinal survey, ensuring they left enough of a gap that participants
wouldn’t complain of being over-surveyed.
8. The references to “fives” and “twos” in these extracts relate to people who fall within
the cluster groups generated by the quantitative analysis—among other things, sam-
pling decisions meant identifying areas where “cluster incumbents,” i.e., “ones,” “twos,”
“threes,” “fours,” and “fives,” could be found in particular concentrations. As an array,
“ones” and “fives” would be at different ends of a respondent spectrum that ranged
from the socially well connected to the socially disconnected.
Chapter 14
1. The solution to the problem in Figure 14.1 is given in Appendix A.
Chapter 16
1. There are other possibilities—such as the way Actor-Network Theory used and
reworked some ethnomethodological sensibilities, the use of ethnomethodology in
the social studies of science, where ethnomethodology had been influential, or the
combination of ethnomethodology sensibilities with conversation analytic and eth-
nographic methods in studies of work and other endeavors. I hope, however, that
practitioners within these traditions will recognize their predicament in the examples
I have chosen.
2. There is a rich literature on CA. For the purposes of this section, I mostly rely on the
work of Schegloff and (to a lesser extent) Sacks, since they are its prime architects.
3. Note here that, consistent with CA’s critique of other theoretical stances, intersub-
jectivity is not assumed (as it is with Schütz [1932] 1967, where it is considered an
492 Notes
immediately given experience of the other) but is shown to require ongoing, delicate,
work: it is an achievement, not a given.
4. This section is heavily indebted to Jack Katz’s mode of training graduate students.
Chapter 17
1. As the title implies, Watts means that once we know an outcome of some social process,
it is easy and tempting to engage in post hoc theorizing or storytelling to suggest how
it was made possible. We select a few factors that, by the compelling nature of common
sense, seem utterly relevant, and figure that we’ve explained the phenomenon, whereas
really all we have done is to describe the orderly process of what happened rather than
why it happened. Despite its inbuilt power to convince, we are not going to be able to
predict anything with this retrospective use of commonsense. That critique is most
certainly a valid one.
2. Mates (2013), Mikesell (2013), and Smith (2013) take explicitly ethnomethodolog-
ical approaches to the understanding and analysis of interactions where patients with
fronto-temporal dementia (FTD) engage in behaviors that caregivers perceive, and
may treat, as inappropriate, thus making visible such properties of interaction as the
expectation of “progressivity.” See also Goodwin’s edited book on conversation and
brain damage (2003b) and especially Schegloff ’s (2003) chapter in that volume.
3. The relation between the disorderly aspects of autism and commonsense is well rec-
ognized in autobiographical (Grandin 1995:37–38) as well as scholarly literature (e.g.,
Frith 2003:47) regarding the syndrome.
4. More specifically: “This activity assesses the participant’s ability to communicate about
a familiar series of actions using gesture or mime with accompanying language, and to
report on a routine event” (Lord et al. 2012:113).
5. See Hollin and Pilnick’s (2018:1220–21) consideration of a case in which a young adult
is being assessed by way of the ADOS. About the Demonstration Task, the clinician
proposes that he “might feel a bit silly doing it,” and then asks him to pretend that she
is a “small child” who does not know how to do the task. The client refuses to perform
the task, and when asked why, he says, “I can’t imagine you to be a ch(h)ild.” (The par-
enthetical “h” in “ch(h)ild)” indicates a laughter token.)
6. The “you-did” utterance is like the “newsmarks” that Heritage (1984a:342) investigates,
which are not syntactically formatted as queries and can signal pre-disagreement.
7. Stivers and Sidnell (2016) show that in everyday play activities, children use “Let’s X”
to propose a new joint activity, whereas “How about X” signifies a modification of the
ongoing activity in a way that decreases the distance between the new and the prior
activities.
8. The helping literature on autism discusses the importance of distinguishing between
“can’t” and “won’t” in the responses to instructions and requests on the part of individ-
uals on the spectrum. See, for example, Notbohm (2012).
9. As Hollin and Pilnick (2018:1217) suggest, clinicians may formulate behavior such as
Dan’s “as evidence of fixed traits, rather than responses to the specific environment.”
Notes 493
10. As developers of the ADOS note (Lord et al. 1989:187), the exam is an “interactive
schedule,” where the attempt is to standardize the social context for observing the
behavior of a child. The purpose is “to encourage an interaction that appears natural,”
while also providing “comparable social stimuli for all subjects.” This allows for fol-
lowing relevant social leads of the child.
11. From Dan’s perspective, Jen may be doing something inapposite (in addition to
ignoring his refusals): since he already knows what she’s telling him, she is pro-
viding redundant information—and doing so despite her newsmark, which appears
to treat Dan’s announcement as newsworthy. If so, the possibility is that Jen is also
committing a breach relative to the sense-making of Dan’s embodied conduct, albeit
one that’s invisible to her because of her own anchoring in the common-sense order
of testing.
12. As Maynard (2005) observes about a different subtest from the Brigance Diagnostic
Inventory of Early Development, a child taking the subtest needs not only to be com-
pliant with the immediacy of what he is being asked to do. The child also needs to
understand the overall structure of the testing—the larger course of action in which
specific test items and associated directives are embedded.
13. See note 4.
14. It is not only that Tony increases his volume with this utterance. A pitch diagram,
using Praat software, shows Tony’s normal pitch is about 200–400 Hertz, whereas the
“No don’t help me utterance” starts at 309 hertz and rises to 618 hertz before dropping
back into his normal pitch range. In their data from parent-(typical) child interactions
at home, Goodwin et al. (2012:29) found that children’s refusals of parental direct-
ives were done most dramatically through pitch leaps with rise-fall contours, to
which Tony’s refusal is quite parallel. In addition, children’s refusals exhibited vowel
stretching, as does Tony’s on the word “me” at utterance end. The overall suggestion is
that Tony is using ordinary prosodic skills for his “emphatic” opposition to Laura as
he attempts to align her to his activity rather than pursue the testing activity as such.
15. See Wootton’s (1997:Chapter 2) documentation of how, by the third year of life,
children are able to take sequential understandings into account when engaging in
interaction. Exhibits of distressed behavior on the part of a child may be less an ex-
pression of an internal state and based more on breaches to trajectories that the child
has initiated. The child’s initiation and the action(s) it launches provide a moral war-
rant for the expression of indignation when the co-participant undermines the given
trajectory.
16. See note 7.
17. The concepts of summative and formative evaluation derive from the literature on
educational testing (Heritage 2013; Popham 2008; Sadler 1989). These concepts de-
rive from Scriven’s (1967) original publication and are applied mostly to classroom
learning. In our view, they are also relevant to clinical testing, although we have not
seen previous discussions of this potential.
18. For a thorough review, see Antaki and Wilkinson (2012).
Name Index
Abbott, Andrew, 27 Bittner, Egon, 12, 32, 36–37, 162, 165–166, 173,
Agha, Asif, 486n4 232–233, 236, 243, 477n7, 477n10
Alac, Morana, 123 Bjelić, Dušan I., 123, 341
Alexander, Jeffrey C., 184 Blalock, Hubert M., 14
Allsop, R. E., 405 Blomberg, Jeanette L., 27, 413
American Sociological Association, 2 Bloor, David, 119–121, 163
Anastasi, R., 400 Blumer, Herbert, 27
Andersen, H., 399, 413 Blundell, Stephen, 322–323, 325
Anderson, Elijah, 47 Boas, Evert van Emde, 19
Anderson, R. A., 400 Boden, Deirdre, 21, 32, 38, 126, 483n13
Anderson, R. J., 413 Body, R., 447
Angell, Beth, 172 Bogen, David, 24, 32–33, 238, 240, 349
Antaki, Charles, 21, 24, 493n18 Bolaños-Carpio, Alexa, 172
Antunes, Anna B., 325, 341 Bolden, Galina B., 172
Arar, Raphael, 39 Bourdieu, Pierre, 207, 245
Ariew, Roger, 437 Bowers, John, 399
Arminen, Illka, 429, 481n2 Bowman, Brett, 26
Asperger, Hans, 447 Brahe, Tycho, 189
Atkinson, Maxwell J., 12, 15–16, 19, 33, 40, 236, Brannigan, Augustine, 488n2
238, 429 Brasier, Martin D. 192
Brigham, Nicolette Bainbridge, 465
Baccus, Melinda, 356 Broeder, Dale W., 394
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 196 Broth, M., 292, 402
Bannister, Robert C., 229 Brown, Barry, 130, 295
Barlow, Alexandra, 41 Brown, Penelope, 19, 279
Barnes, Barry, 119 Brubaker, Rogers, 424, 433
Barnes, Rebecca, 38 Bruner, Jerome, 108, 111, 481nn13–15
Barston, Julie L., 371 Burma, John, 487n4
Barth-Weingarten, D., 486n4 Burnham, John P., 218, 220
Becker, Howard S., 27, 43, 117, 143–145, Burns, Stacy, 123, 127, 131, 236
230–231, 234, 241–242, 351, 431, 482n4, Büscher, Monika, 399
484n2, 487n1 Button, Graham, 34, 37–39, 43, 116, 120, 126,
Beckett, Megan, 430 128, 132, 252, 297, 399
Bell, Daniel, 230
Benford, Steve, 117, 400 Calhoun, Craig, 4
Benzecry, Claudio E., 352, 490n3 Callon, Michel, 121
Berard, Tim, 33, 241, 483n12 Camic, Charles M., 162, 348, 352
Berger, Peter L., 43 Casey, Neil, 297
Bergmann, Jörg, 23, 182 Cassirer, Ernst, 80
Berthod, Christophe, 323, 325, 341 Cekaite, Asta, 449, 453, 461, 465, 493n14
Best Short Stories of 1941, 96 Chambliss, William J., 167
Best, Joel, 228, 232 Chevrel, Roger, 323
Bierstedt, Robert, 159 Cho, Adrian, 323
Biggs, Michael, 437 Chomsky, Noam, 265
Billig, Michael, 24 Cicourel, Aaron, 12, 14, 16, 41–42, 150, 232–233,
Bishop, Somer L., 449, 452, 492n4 236, 477n10, 478n14, 484n6
496 Name Index
Clayman, Steven E., 17, 19, 21, 165, 182, 184–185, Dupret, Baudouin, 33, 236, 483n12
238–239, 245, 264, 278–279, 423, 426, 477n8, Durkheim, Émile, 14–15, 94, 111, 128, 236
483n12
Clegg, K., 447 Edge, David, 119
Cleverly, Jason, 400 Edwards, Derek, 22, 24, 477n5
Clift, Rebecca, 19, 488n6 Eglin, Peter, 240, 242
Cloward, Richard A., 230 Eilan, N., 295
Cohen, Albert K., 230 Elliott, Marc N., 430
Collins, Harry, 119, 121, 336, 482n5 Emerson, Robert M., 27, 236–237, 431, 434,
Collins, Patricia Hill, 45–46 477n7
Connell, Raewyn, 214, 222, 486n2 Emirbayer, Mustafa, 30, 477n8
Coser, Lewis, 17, 480n8 Enfield, Nicholas J., 19, 188, 279, 486n4
Costall, Alan, 468 Engelke, Christopher R., 44
Coulter, Jeff, 23–24, 236, 243, 295, 444, 477n5, Engeström, Y., 399
482n6, 488n2 Englert, Christina, 19, 279
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, 19, 49, 279 Erickson, Frederick, 465, 469
Cox, James R., 371 Erikson, Kai T., 230
Crabtree, Andrew, 116, 132, 400, 413 Ervin-Tripp, Susan, 449
Craven, Alexandra, 449, 451, 453 Euclid, 123
Crawley, Sara L., 487n1 Evaldsson, Ann-Carita, 47
Crittenden, Kathleen, 7–8, 271, 293 Evans, Jonathan St. B. T., 371
Csibra, Gergely. 207 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 423
Curl, Traci S., 450–451, 459 Eveleth, Rose, 447
Czyzewski, Marek, 344 Ewick, Patricia, 179

David, Gary C., 33 Farber, Marvin, 478n1, 479n2
Davidson, Judy A., 276, 279 Fasula, Alessandra, 36
Davies, A. C., 405 Feischmidt, Margit, 433
Davis, Kingsley, 230 Felt, Ulrike, 323
Dawson, Michelle, 447, 449 Feltovich, Paul, 36, 38, 484n15
Day, Lincoln, 15 Fenstermaker, Sarah, 46, 215
Day, Sophie, 348, 357 Filippi, Geneviève, 399
De Beauvoir, Simone, 487n7 Fine, Gary Alan, 27
De Ruiter, Jan Peter, 19, 279 Finestone, Harold, 230
Decroux, Marc, 323, 325, 341 Fischer, Øystein, 323, 325, 341
Demuer, Alfredo, 325, 341 Fish, Stanley, 118, 357
Denzin, Norman K., 28, 214 Fitch, W. Tecumseh, 204
Derrida, Jacques, 349 Fitzgerald, Richard, 21–22
The Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 482n3 Flintham, M., 400
DiDomenico, Stephen M., 172 Ford, Cecilia E., 38
Diggins, T., 400 Fornel, Michel, 481n1
DiLavore, Pamela, C., 449, 452, 492n4 Foucault, Michel, 469
Dingemanse, Mark, 19 Fox, Jon, 433
Doing, Park, 322, 482n8 Francis, D., 400
Donnellan, Anne M., 465 Fraser, Mike, 400
Douglas, Jack, 15, 40 Freese, Jeremy, 430
Dourish, P., 413 Freud, Sigmund, 80, 486n2
Drew, Paul, 19, 21–23, 32–33, 41, 171, 236–238, Friedan, Betty, 487n6
279, 420, 429, 450–451, 459 Frith, Uta, 468, 492n3
Drozd, A., 400 Fuchs-Epstein, Cynthia, 487n6
Du Bois, W. E. B., 90, 485n1
Dubois, Cédric, 323, 325, 341 Galileo, 123
Duck, Waverly, 25–26, 47 Garbarski, Dana, 430
Duneier, Mitchell, 47, 433 Garcia, Angela Cora, 44
Name Index 497
Garfinkel, Harold, 1–12, 16–18, 21, 23, 26, Gross, Niel, 348, 352
28–29, 31–32, 34–35, 39–47, 50–51, 90–93, Gubrium, Jaber F., 236
95–102, 105, 107–110, 114–129, 131–132, Güntherodt, Hans-Joachim, 324
141, 148, 160, 162–166, 171, 178, 184, 214– Günthner, Susanne, 297, 307
225, 227–228, 232–233, 235–236, 239–240, Gurwitsch, Aron, 9, 316
252–265, 269, 271, 280, 289, 290–291, 295,
309, 316, 318, 322, 324–326, 336, 341–342, Hacking, Ian, 488–489n2
344, 349–351, 353–356, 358, 366–368, 393– Haebig, Eileen, 465
394, 398, 400–402, 420–429, 433, 437–438, Hammersley, Martyn, 344
442–445, 448, 451–452, 468–469, 477n1, Harjunpää, Katariina, 19, 279
477n9, 477n12, 477–478n13, 479nn2–3, Harper, Richard, 38, 399–400, 413
480nn5–8, 481nn9–10, 481n12, 481nn14–15, Harris, Roy, 253
481–482n2, 482n4, 482n9, 483nn10–14, Hart, H.L.A., 164
484nn4–5, 484n7, 484n15, 486n1, 487n4, Hayashi, Makoto, 19, 279
487n8, 488nn1–2, 489nn3–4, 490n1, 490n4, Heath, Christian, 38, 41, 123, 292, 302, 399–400,
491n5 402, 486n4
Garot, Robert, 236, 242 Heemsbergen, Jacquelyn, 493n10
Gergely, György, 207 Heims, S. J., 480n8
Gernsbacher, Morton Ann, 447, 449 Heinemann, Trine, 19, 279
Gibbons, S. C., 400 Hemmings, T., 400
Gibson, James J., 458 Hempel, Carl, 163
Gilbert, G. Nigel, 24, 36 Henderson, Kathryn, 37, 399
Gill, Virginia Teas, 242, 244 Heritage, John, 9–10, 12–14, 17–19, 21–22,
Gilmore, Glenda E., 94, 480n6 29–30, 40, 42, 43–44, 49, 115, 162–165, 170,
Glaser, Barney G., 431 177, 182, 202, 206, 228, 238–239, 252–253,
Glenn, Phillip, 469 255, 265, 278–279, 290, 310, 348, 351, 354,
Gödel, Kurt, 123 420, 423, 427, 429, 430, 443–444, 451, 456,
Goffman, Alice, 47 468–469, 483n12, 488n5, 492n6
Goffman, Erving, 28–29, 31, 193–194, 196–197, Heritage, Margaret, 469, 493n17
231, 241, 252–254, 261–265, 271, 280, 299, Hesse-Biber, Sharlene, 348, 353, 358
398, 401, 427, 444, 479nn2–3, 487n4, 488n3 Hesselbein, Chris, 130
Goldie, Terrie, 487n7 Hester, Stephen, 240, 242
Goldvarg, Yevgeniya, 372, 396 Higginbotham, David Jeffery, 44
Gomez, José Andrés, 351 Hilbert, Richard A., 477nn10–11
Goode, David, 44, 237, 243, 444, 470, 493n10 Hill, Richard J., 7–8, 271, 293, 355, 482n4
Goodman, Nelson, 360, Hindmarsh, Jon, 38, 302, 399–400, 402, 486n4
Goodman, Philip, 432–433 Hobbes, Thomas, 83
Goodwin, Charles, 13, 19, 24, 36, 38, 44, 123, Hobbs, Allyson, 487n4
188, 190, 192, 194, 196–201, 203, 205–206, Hoerl, C., 295
236–237, 243, 292, 295, 302, 305, 400, 402, Hollin, Gregory, 492n5, 492n9
445, 449, 461, 470, 484n15, 485n1, 486n4, Holstein, James A., 236, 243–244, 487n1
486nn7–8, 486n11, 492n2, 493n14 Holt, Elizabeth, 237
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, 19, 36, 47, 196– Homans, George C., 162–163
197, 400, 449, 453, 461, 465, 485n1 Hopper, Paul J., 297, 307
Gotham, Katherine, 449, 452, 492n4, 493n14 Housley, William, 21–22
Gougeon, Pierre, 325, 341 Hoymann, Gertie, 19
Gouldner, Alvin W., 231 Hoymann, Gertie, 279
Grancea, Liana, 433 Hughes, Everett, 145
Grandin, Temple, 492n3 Hughes, J., 399–400, 413
Greatbatch, David, 238–239, 279 Humă, Bogdana, 358
Greenhalgh, C., 400 Husserl, Edmund, 34, 71, 80, 130, 202, 478n1
Greiffenhagen, Christian, 35, 42, 123, 127, 348, Hutchby, Ian, 239
352, 354, 359–360 Hutchins, Edwin, 38, 201
Griggs, Richard A., 371 Hutchinson, Phil, 128, 350
498 Name Index
Ibarra, Peter R., 240 Lamont, Michèle, 348, 352–353

Ingold, Tim, 192, 201, 205 Larsson, C., 47
Iwasaki, Shimako, 188, 196 Latour, Bruno, 24, 34, 120–121, 343, 482n9,
486n9
James, William, 74 Laurier, Eric, 130, 295, 402
Jarzynka, Melanie A., 465 Lawlor, Mary, 447
Jasanoff, Shiela, 245 LeBaron, Curtis, 19, 36, 38, 292, 484n15, 486n4
Jayyusi, Lena, 23, 241–242 Lee, John R. E., 242, 252, 401
Jefferson, Gail, 18–19, 141, 188, 197, 275, 456, Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy, 264
469, 484n5, 488n2, 488n4, 489n4 Lemert, Charles, 45
Jocher, Katharine, 2 Lenski, Gerhard, 160
Johnson-Laird, Philip N., 371–372, 396 Leudar, Ivan, 468
Jones, Nikki, 12–13, 26, 32, 47 Levinson, Stephen C., 19, 188, 279, 486n5
Jordan, Brigitte, 41, 484n16 Lewin, David, 80
Jordan, Heather, 493n10 Liberman, Kenneth, 31–32, 35, 123, 130, 291, 322
Joseph, Isaac, 401 Licoppe, Christian, 399–400
Joynt, Chase, 225 Lindesmith, Alfred R., 230
Jungleib, Lillian, 12–13, 32 Lindström, Anna, 21
Jurik, Nancy, 215 Lindwall, Oskar, 129
Linell, Per., 188, 198, 253
Kahneman, Daniel, 371 Livingston, Eric, 8, 21, 35–36, 42, 44, 47, 116,
Kameo, Nahoko, 22, 41, 430, 432 123–124, 126–127, 129, 131, 253, 271, 322,
Kanner, Leo, 447 325–326, 336, 341, 344, 477n12, 483n10,
Kant, Immanuel, 71, 80, 82 483n13, 484n5, 484n7, 488n1, 489n3
Karasti, H., 413 Llewellyn, Nick, 38
Karsenty, Alain, 400 Lo, B., 403
Kashimura, 33 Locke, Abigail, 24
Katz, Jack, 27, 477n7, 492n4 Longino, Helen E., 245
Kaufmann, Felix, 122, 232, 479nn3–4 Lord, Catherine, 449, 452, 492n4, 493n10
Kaukomaa, Timo, 188 Lortz, Rolf, 325, 341
Keisanen, Tiina, 19, 279 Loseke, Donileen R., 236
Kendon, Adam, 263–264, 279, 486n4 Luckmann, Thomas, 43
Kendrick, Kobin H., 19, 488nn5–6 Luff, Paul, 38, 41, 399–400, 486n4
Kepler, Johannes, 189 Lundbery, George A., 480n8
Kessler, Suzanne, 46, 487n5 Lury, Celia, 348, 357
Khoudor, L. A., 403 Lynch, Michael, 8–9, 18, 24, 32–35, 41, 43,
Kierans, Ciara, 41 116, 120, 123, 126–130, 132, 236–238, 240,
Kim, Kyung-Man, 351 243–244, 252, 281, 291, 295, 322, 325, 336,
King, V., 413 341, 478n13, 482n2, 482n5, 482n7, 483n10,
Kirby, Kenton de, 447 483nn12–13, 484n15, 488n1, 489nn3–4
Kitsuse, John I., 42–43, 228, 232, 238, 240 Lynd, Robert S., 229
Kitzinger, Celia, 21–22, 25, 245, 453
Knorr-Cetina, Karin, 34, 201, 482n7 Macbeth, Douglas, 39, 123, 126, 129, 309, 341,
Komarovsky, Mirra, 159, 487n6 483n10, 483n13, 488n1
Komter, Martha, 32–33 MacKenzie, Donald, 119
Koschmann, Timothy, 36, 38, 322, 484n15 MacLean, A., 400
Krause, Monika, 352 MacLeod, Robert B., 80
Kroeber, Alfred Louis, 158 Madge, John, 480n8
Kuhn, Thomas S., 357 Mair, Michael, 41–42, 348, 352, 354, 359–360
Majid, Asifa, 430
Lagos, Danya, 46 Mandelbaum, Jenny, 21–22, 172
Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, 24 Manktelow, Ken, 371
Lambrecht, Knud, 297 Mann, Thomas, 82
Name Index 499
Mannheim, Karl, 8, 119, 257, 482n5 Mori, Junko, 47

Manning, Peter K., 27 Mottron, Laurent, 447, 449
Manrique, Elizabeth, 19 Mulkay, Michael, 24, 36, 119
Manuel, Alfred A., 323 Müller, G., 297
Manzo, John F., 32–33, 236 Murphy, Keith M., 399
Marlaire, Courtney L., 446, 468, 470 Murray, Pauli, 100, 480n6
Marr, L., 400 Muskett, T., 447
Martin, John L., 424
Mates, Andrea W., 492n2 Nagel, Ernst, 163
Matoesian, Gregory, 236 Namaste, Viviane, 214, 224
Matricon, Jean, 322 Newton, Isaac, 189
Matthewman, Richard, 192 Nishizaka, Aug, 36, 47, 295
Matza, David, 43, 230 Notbohm, Ellen, 492n8
Mauthner, Natasha, 353 Nowotny, Helga, 323
Mawhood, Lynn, 493n10
Maynard, Douglas W., 9, 17, 19, 22, 23, 29, O’Brien, J., 399
31–33, 41–42, 44, 165, 184–185, 236–237, The Occupation Information Network, 482n3
242, 244–245, 264, 279, 348–349, 359, 367, Ochs, Elinor, 445
426, 429, 430–431, 443–444, 446–447, 455, Odum, Howard, 2, 94
468–470, 477n8, 483n12, 484n16, 493n12 Ogien, Albert, 481n1
McCormack, T., 295 Ogiermann, Eva, 460
McDonald-Wikler, 44, 237, 243, 444 Ohlin, Lloyd E., 230
McDuffie, Andrea, 465 Opie, Iona, 266
McKenna, Wendy, 46, 214, 487n5 Opie, Peter, 266
McMahon, Sean, 192 Opportunity, 96–97
Mead, George Herbert, 80 Orr, Julian, 37
Meehan, Albert J., 32, 40–41, 102, 165, 168 Osborne, Thomas, 351, 357, 490n2
Mehan, Hugh, 17 Ostermann, Ana Cristina, 245
Merino, Bernat Roig, 351
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 157 Palmer, Richard E., 9
Merton, Robert K., 119, 162, 163, 230 Paré, Alfred, 325, 341
Messinger, Sheldon L., 237 Parsons, Talcott, 1–2, 4–6, 27, 45, 71–72, 76–89,
Meyerowitz, Joanne, 215–217, 487n7 106, 110, 158, 162–163, 222, 252–253, 262,
Middleton, David, 24, 399 265, 478n1, 478n13
Mikesell, Lisa, 172, 492n2 Pawluch, Dorothy, 43, 487n1
Miller, Gale, 236, 487n1 Paxton, M., 400
Mills, C. Wright, 94, 227, 229 Pekarek, Doehler S., 297
Milton, Beth, 41 Penn, A., 405
Mirenda, Patricia L., 465 Peräkylä, Anssi, 188, 292, 445, 460
Mische, Ann, 30 Perkins, M., 447
Mishler, Elliot G., 41 Petrović, Alexander P., 323, 325, 341
Moerman, Michael, 141 Peyrot, Mark, 236, 244
Mogensen, Preben, 399 Pike, Kenneth L., 424
Mogk, David W., 207 Pilnick, Alison, 486n4, 492n5, 492n9
Moloney, Molly, 215 Pinch, Trevor, 119
Molotch, Harvey L., 32, 47 Pitsch, K., 399
Mondada, Lorenza, 13, 19, 23, 36, 38, 292, 295, Plowman, L., 413
301–302, 318, 400, 402, 420, 484n15, 486n4, Polanyi, Michael, 129, 342
489n4 Pollard, Paul., 371
Money, John, 487n7 Pollner, Melvin, 16, 27, 33, 43–45, 234–237, 239,
Monzoni, Chiara M., 36 243, 354, 422–423, 425, 431, 434, 444, 477n7,
Moore, Robert J., 39 482n2, 487n1
Morel, Julien, 400 Pomerantz, Anita, 23, 32, 237, 276, 279
500 Name Index
Popham, W. James, 493n17 Rossano, Federico, 19, 279, 292

Porcellato, Lorna, 41 Rossi, Alice, 487n6
Potel, Marcel, 325, 341 Rossi, Giovanni, 19, 22
Potel, Michel, 323 Roubaud, M. H., 297
Potter, Jonathan, 23–24, 449, 451, 453, 477n5 Rouncefield, Mark, 116–117, 123, 132, 399, 413,
Powers, Charles H., 422 483n12
Pratt, Steven, 21, 47 Row-Farr, J., 400
Price, Jessica, 130 Rughiniș, Cosmina, 358
Primer for White Folks, 96 Russon, Anne E., 486n10
Prince, Ellen F., 297 Rutter, Michael, 449, 452, 492n4, 493n10
Psathas, George, 130 Ruusuvuori, Johanna, 188, 292
Pycock, J., 400 Ryle, Gilbert, 125, 129

Quéré, Louis, 342, 481n1 Sacks, Harvey, 16–25, 47, 92, 116, 120, 125,
Quinney, Richard, 231 141–142, 148, 150–151, 153–155, 158–159,
188, 197, 232–233, 235–236, 239–240, 242,
Raby, Rebecca C., 214 253–256, 258–281, 290–291, 293, 355, 358,
Rae, John, 44, 445 398, 409, 426–427, 449, 477n4, 484n5, 485n2,
Ragin, Charles C., 431 486n3, 487n1, 488n2, 488n4, 489n4, 491n2
Ramage, M., 413 Sadler, D. Royce, 493n17
Randall, D., 413 Sahlström, Fritjof, 486n6
Randall, L., 400 Salloum, Danièle, 325, 341
Rapley, Mark, 237, 244 Saloman, Gavriel, 38
Rasmussen, Gitte, 44, 445 Sanders, Robert E., 32
Rauniomaa, Mirka, 19, 279 Santi, George, 323, 325, 341
Rawls, Anne W., 2–6, 25–26, 33–34, 47, 91, 93, Sapir, Edward, 154
105, 110–111, 128, 252, 254–255, 318, 399, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 478n1
424–425, 427, 477n12, 477–478n13, 487n3 Sassatelli, Roberta, 214–215, 221, 224
Rawls, John, 10 Schaeffer, Nora Cate, 41–42, 348–349, 359, 367,
Raymond, Chase Wesley, 19, 22, 25, 279, 488n6 430, 483n12, 484n16
Raymond, Geoffrey, 12–13, 21–22, 26, 29, 32, Schaffer, Simon, 119
41, 170, 177, 182, 239, 279 Scheflen, Albert E., 264
Read, Rupert, 128, 350 Schegloff, Emanuel, 18–20, 23, 25, 41, 49,
Reber, E., 486n4 125–126, 141, 150–151, 154, 171, 174, 182,
Redley, Marcus, 245 188, 197, 238, 242, 253, 259, 261–262, 264–
Reichler, Robert J., 467 267, 274–275, 278–281, 292–293, 298, 306,
Remagnino, Paolo, 405 426–430, 449, 457, 460, 477n2, 477n6, 484n5,
Reynolds, Peter, 205 485n2, 488n2, 488n4, 491n2, 492n2
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 343 Schelly, David, 33
Risi, Susan, 449, 452, 492n4 Schilt, Kristen, 4, 16, 46, 225, 444
Robillard, Albert B., 44, 126, 129, 341, 444, 470, Schneider, Joseph, 43, 232, 487n1
483n10, 483n13, 488n1 Schopler, Eric, 467, 493n10
Robinson, Jeffrey D., 172, 430, 488n6 Schütz, Alfred, 6–7, 13, 30, 43, 71–72, 77, 78–86,
Rock, Paul, 429 88–89, 118, 122, 125, 154, 164, 232, 442, 444,
Rodden, Tom, 116, 399, 413 468, 478n1, 478n13, 482n4, 491n3
Roessler, J., 295 Schwabe, Arthur D., 218, 220
Rogers, Mary, 214 Schwartz, Howard, 484n3
Rogers, Y., 413 Scriven, Michael, 493n17
Romaniuk, Tanya, 172 Searles, Darcey, 172
Rose, Nikolas, 357 Seedhouse, Paul, 19
Rosen, Alexander, 216–218, 487n4 Sellen, A., 399
Rosenberg, Rosalind, 97, 99, 480n6 Selting, Marget, 19, 49, 486n4
Ross, Dorothy, 229 Senior, James K., 118
Name Index 501
Seuren, Lucas M., 32 app, Jon, 465

T
Shapin, Steven, 119 Tarde, Gabriel, 482n9
Shapiro, Dan, 399–400 Tashakkori, Abbas, 348
Sharrock, Wes W., 34, 37, 39, 42–43, 120, 123, Tavory, Iddo, 28, 431, 434
126–128, 132, 295, 322, 348, 350, 352, 354, Taylor, A. S., 399–400
359–360, 399–400 Teddlie, Charles, 348
Sherman, Wendy, 326 ten Have, Paul, 252
Shibutani, Tamotsu, 479n3 Teplitskiy, Misha, 490n4
Shils, Edward A., 5, 162–163, 478n1 Terasaki, A. K., 276
Sidnell, Jack, 19, 252, 445, 492n7 Theureau, Jacques, 399
Siemsen, Cynthia, 215 Timmermans, Stefan, 431
Sigman, Marian, 465 Tolmie, Peter, 116–117, 123, 132, 399–400,
Silberman, Steve, 447 483n12
Silbey, Susan S., 179 Tolson, Andrew, 239
Siller, Michael, 465 Torreira, Francisco, 488n5
Silverman, David, 237 Trainum, James, 33
Simmel, Georg, 6 Travers, Max, 33
Simon, Herbert, 111, 363 Traweek, Sharon, 24, 482n7
Singh, Ranjit, 130 Tur, Antonio Aledo, 351
Smith, Brewster, 108, 481n15 Turner, Jonathan H., 229, 351
Smith, Dorothy E., 16, 43, 45, 237, 243, 431–432 Turner, Stephen P., 229
Smith, Michael Sean, 492n2 Turowetz, Jason, 4–6, 22–23, 26, 31, 41, 44, 47,
Social Forces, 102 91, 105, 444, 446–447, 455, 468–470
Solomon, David H., 218, 220 Tversky, Amos, 371
Solomon, Olga, 445
Sormani, Phillippe, 35, 324–326, 342–343, van Delft, Dirk, 322
489n5, 489n8, 490n10 Vance, Rupert B., 2, 110
Soulière, Isabelle, 447, 449 Vanderstraeten, Raf, 5
Spade, Dean, 214 Vehviläinen, Sanna, 445
Spector, Malcolm, 43, 228, 238 Velastin, Sergio A., 403, 405
Speer, Susan A., 22, 24, 25 Vincencio-Silva, M. A., 403, 405
Steensig, Jakob, 23 Vinkhuyzen, Eric, 37, 399
Sterponi, Laura, 447, 460 vom Lehn, Dirk, 16, 38, 123, 400–401
Stevanovic, Melisa, 460
Stivers, Tanya, 19, 22–23, 279, 292, 297, 430, Wacey, David, 192
453, 492n7 Wakeford, Nina, 348, 357
Stokoe, Elizabeth, 22, 24–25 Waller, Willard, 228
Stoller, Robert J., 216–218, 220, 222, 487n4, 487n7 Wason, Peter C., 371
Stones-Crittenden, Kathleen, 355, 482n4 Watson, Rod, 14, 22, 236, 242, 401
Strauss, Anselm L., 431 Watts, Duncan, 442, 492n1
Streeck, Jürgen, 19, 292, 486n4 Waysand, Georges, 322
Suchman, Lucy, 37–38, 41, 130, 398, 400, Weatherall, Ann, 21
484n16 Weber, Max, 77, 80, 122, 478n1
Sudnow, David, 39, 43, 102, 116–117, 127, Weeks, Peter, 127
131, 143–144, 233, 236, 334, 477n10, 482n4, Wei, Wan, 172
484n1 Weilenmann, A., 47
Sun, J., 403 Weinberg, Darin, 41, 43, 236, 241, 244–245,
Sutherland, Edwin, 230 487n1
Svennevig, Jan, 38 Weismer, Susan Ellis, 465
Swan, L., 399–400 West, Candace, 24, 46, 214–215
Swidler, Ann, 352–353 Wetherell, Margaret, 23–24
Sykes, Gresham M., 43 Whalen, Jack, 22, 35, 37, 38, 41, 242, 399,
Szymanski, Margaret H., 38, 399 429–430, 432
502 Name Index
Whalen, Marilyn R., 37, 399, 429 Woods, Susan E., 41

White, Robert, 108, 481n15 Wooffitt, Robin, 237
Whitehead, Kevin A., 25–26 Woolgar, Steve, 24, 34–35, 43, 120, 486n9,
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 154 487n1
Widdicombe, Sue, 21, 237 Wootton, A. J., 493n15
Wieder, Lawrence D., 12, 16, 21, 28–30, 47, Wrong, Dennis H., 162
92, 162, 178, 227, 232, 235–236, 295, 344,
420–421, 434 Yin, J. H., 405
Wiener, Norbert, 75 Yoder, Paul J., 465
Wiesendanger, Roland, 324 Yoon, Kyung-Eun, 19, 279
Wikipedia, 192
Wilkes, Michael, 430 Zehetmayer, Martin, 343
Wilkinson, Ray, 44, 445, 493n18 Zemel, Alan, 322
Wilkinson, Sue, 453 Zimmerman, Don H., 12–13, 17, 19, 21, 24,
Wilson, Thomas, 11, 14, 162–164, 481n2, 27–29, 32–33, 45–46, 126, 162, 165, 182,
488n2 214–215, 234–236, 239, 242, 354, 399, 425,
Winch, Peter, 118, 122 429, 483n13
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 111, 122, 202, 357, Zinken, Jörg, 460
483n13 Znaniecki, Florian, 2
Wood, Houston, 17 Zwisterlood, Inge, 19, 279
Subject Index
accomplishment, achievement, 5, 16, 27–28, 32, attitude of daily life (ADL), 6–7, 30, 76, 442
43, 46–48, 92–93, 109, 145–147, 154, See also natural attitude
159, 215, 221–222, 224–225, 289, 291, atypical interaction, 44, 442–445, 470
293–294, 317, 349, 401, 423, 431, 445, audio/video recordings, 7, 33, 35, 105, 108, 166,
488n1, 491–492n3 197, 237, 254, 259, 265, 267, 281, 289,
accountability, accountable, accounting, 8, 295, 446
13–14, 16, 18, 22, 26, 28–30, 36, 49, 94, autism, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD),
154–155, 158, 165, 169–170, 172, 181– 442–443, 445–448, 455–457, 468,
185, 221, 232, 260–261, 271, 290–291, 492n3, 492n8
293, 307, 316, 355, 371, 375, 381, 383, Autism Diagnostic and Observation Schedule
425, 431, 438, 446, 481n2, 483n15 (ADOS), 449–456, 492n5, 493n10
motivational, 454, 456, 460–462, 468–469 autistic intelligence, 447–448, 469–470
obstructed, 383, 386
organization(s), 142 body torque, 306
reflexive and reflexivity, 153 breaching experiments and demonstrations,
scientific, 33, 42, 261, 266–267, 280 1, 7, 9–11, 98, 217–218, 232, 269, 400,
accounts, 30–31, 96, 103, 268–270, 436 444, 468
narrative, 102–103 See also trust
action, 1, 4–5, 10–14, 16, 18–19, 21–22, 25, bureaucracy, bureaucratic, 29–30, 142
47, 252, 254–255, 257–262, 265, 267,
269–272, 274, 276, 280–281, 289, 294, calibration, 207–208
421–426, 429, 431, 434, 437 camera, video camera, camera glasses, 295, 299
accumulative practices or accumulative category, categories, 20, 25, 170, 178, 184, 424,
combinatorial organization of, 201–205 433, 481n9, 485n4
collaborative, cooperative, 190, 201, 203, accounts, 25
206, 208 assignment, 99, 109
See also social action descriptive, 22
theory of, 71–72, 105–106, 253 membership, 17, 20–23, 47–48
actor-network theory (ANT), 121, 491n1 See also Membership Categorization
ad hocing, 12, 40–41, 259 Analysis (MCA)
adjacency pairs, 276, 445, 449, 460 categorize, categorization, 22, 90–91, 170, 178,
agency, 165, 184, 198 184, 433
agent, 165, 184–185 See also Membership Categorization Analysis
Agnes, 4, 16, 21, 24, 29, 45–46, 91, 148, 214–225, (MCA)
232, 236–237, 479n2, 480n6, 486n2, “centres of coordination”, 400
487n8 characterization problem, 124–125
See also gender See also unique adequacy
See also transgender, transsexual Chicago School, 27–28, 31, 93, 117, 230, 431
aphasia, 198, 244, 445 civil sidewalk ordinance (CSO), 13, 166–172,
apparatus, 20, 225, 271, 290, 293–294 174–175, 177–185, 484–485n1,
apprenticeship, 207, 209 485nn3–4
assessment(s), 279 “move-alongs” as a way of enforcing, 167,
formative, 463, 469–470, 493n17 173, 175, 178–179, 181–182
summative, 469, 493n17 sit/lie ordinance, 166–168, 177–179, 181
asymmetric alternates, 129–130 “classic studies”, 125, 129
See also Lebenswelt pairs Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), 401–413
504 Subject Index
closing sequences, 280–281 See also jury

coding, 44, 115, 148 See also legal
See also survey research crime, 4, 43, 104
cognitive overload, 403, 413 See also legal
collaborative action. See action See also police, policing
collection(s), 292–295, 308–309, 317, 488n6 cultural dope, 12, 221, 223, 227–228
“Color Trouble”, 3–4, 95–102 culture, 12, 14, 31, 188–189, 203, 223, 230, 258,
combinatorial processes, 198, 203, 205–206 266, 271, 279, 290, 421
commonplace activities, 142–143
common-sense, 444–445, 448–449, 469, 492n1, decisions, decision-making, 32, 102, 111,
492n3, 493n11 148–149
conduct, 451, 467 demonstration task(s), 449, 452, 455, 492n5
knowledge and reasoning, 7, 12, 20, 25, 31– See also breaching experiments and
33, 37, 39, 48, 50–51, 217, 221, 255–256, demonstrations
260–262, 268–269, 280, 360, 442, 445, detail, 291-292, 294–296, 308, 483n14
447, 451, 469, 481n2, 487n1 deviance, 43–44, 162, 227–228, 231–232, 234,
testing, 465, 469 236–243, 245
orientation(s), 234 cases of, 277, 280
subterranean, 40, 42 See also social problems
competent system, 155 directives, 167, 449–451, 457–462
competence, counter-, 457, 459–460, 462, 465–466
first-order, 448, 450, 456, 458, 460–461, follow-in, 463, 465
469–470 inclusive, 453
second-order, 448, 470 instructional, 451, 459–460
concurrent organization of action, 196 permissive, 463
conditional relevance, 451 disability, 44–45, 444–446, 468, 484n1
congruency of relevancies, 444 See also atypical interaction
constructive analysis, 129 See also mental disability
See also formal analysis See also social problems
constitutive rules, 5, 10 discourse,
context, contextualization, 1, 6, 11–13, 18–19, morality of, 23
49, 146, 165, 170, 192, 254–255, 257– discovering work, 325, 336, 341–343
258, 260, 264–265, 267–268, 272–274, discovery, 293–294
279–280, 294, 422, 428 discretion, 12, 166, 181
See also indexical disruption, 10
contextual configuration, 193, 197 See also breaching demonstration and
contingency, 291, 293, 308, 317–318 experiments
Conversation Analysis (CA), 17–19, 22–23, distributed existence of speaker and utterance,
26, 49, 114, 124–127, 131–132, 150, 196
237–238, 245, 252–253, 255, 259–261, documentary, Framing Agnes, 225
268, 272, 276, 280–281, 290, 292–295, “Documentary Method of Interpretation”,
400–401, 420, 426–430, 445, 448, 470, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 16, 34, 40, 48, 148, 149,
477n1, 483n12, 484n15, 485n2, 488n3, 254–259, 477n1
491nn1–3 See also hermeneutic circle
convict code, 29–30, 235, 434
cooperative action. See action ecology, 206, 291–293, 298–299, 301, 304, 308,
cooperative semiosis. See semiosis 316–318, 409, 413
cooperative transformation zone, 202–203, See also environment
205–206, 209 See also epistemic ecology
computer-supported cooperative work “ecology of sign systems”, 445
(CSCW), 37–38, 131–132, 398, 400 ELAN,
See also workplace and work practice studies software, 296
courtroom process, 3–4, 7–8 transcript, 298, 300, 303–304, 306, 312, 314
Subject Index 505
embodied, embodiment, 289, 291–295, 303–304, fact. See social fact

307–308, 312, 316, 481n2 feminist, 480n6
See also gesture sociology. See sociology
emic, 253, 261 266–267, 271, 280, 294, 424 theory, 47
endogenous, 291 field of view, 326, 328, 333, 338, 411
sociologies and anthropologies, 115 footing, 194
environment, 400, 411, 413–414 formal analysis, 481n2
epistemic ecology, 13, 195, 208–209 Framing Agnes, 225
epistemic(s), 200–201, 455, 459
domain, 451 game(s), 10
stance, 451 theory, 32
epistemology, 71 Garfinkel, Harold,
Husserlian tradition, 71 biography, 2
Kantian tradition, 71 See also “Color Trouble”
“epoché of the natural attitude”, 6–7 See also “Documentary Method of
See also attitude of daily life Interpretation”
See also natural attitude and Harvard University, 4–5, 90, 93, 95,
ethnography, ethnographic, 26–28, 30–31, 104–107, 254, 481n14
117, 120–121, 123, 131–132, 143–144, Harvard dissertation, 1, 6, 49, 91, 105,
149–150, 166, 169, 214, 218, 225, 259, 109–110
265, 353, 420, 430–434, 436, 477n1, on Max Weber, 1
477n7, 477n9, 478n13, 482n7, 483n10, and Odum, Howard, 91, 93–94, 102, 110,
491n1 480n5, 480n7
See also institutional and Parsons, Talcott, 1, 4–6, 8, 26, 91, 93,
reportage, 143, 148 104–106, 110, 252
scientific laboratories, 120–121 phenomenological influences on, 3, 34–35, 254
work, workplaces, 120 See also problem of order
ethnomethodology, ethnomethodological 114, and Sacks, Harvey, 92, 116, 125, 141–142,
120, 125–129, 132, 148, 157–159, 214, 239–240, 253–254, 256, 261–262, 265,
217–218, 221, 224, 227–228, 232, 239, 269, 290
243, 290–291, 295, 348–349, 394, 398, and Schütz, Alfred, 6, 91, 110, 164, 256
400, 413, 420–427, 429–433, 442–446, on social scientific methods, 253, 348–351,
448, 477nn7–9, 478n13, 481nn1–2, 353–357, 367–368
482n4, 483n12, 484n15, 490n1, 491n1, See also trust
492n2 and the United States Air Force, 34
alternate, 227, 349, 353–354 and the United States Army, 90, 93, 477–478n13
critique of, 17 and University of California, Los Angeles,
indifference, 120 6–7, 16, 40, 480n8
legacy of, 16–18, 26–28, 30, 34, 39, 45, 48, and University of North Carolina, 2, 90,
50–51 93–96, 102, 104, 480n5, 480n7
origins of, 7–8, 31–32, 116, 232, 245 gender, 4, 16, 21–25, 45–47, 90, 92, 103, 110,
See also science and technology studies 214–225, 242, 479n1, 480n6, 486n1,
See also workplace studies 487nn6–7
ethnomethods, 32, 92, 443 See also Agnes
See also practices See also transgender, transsexual
excavating, excavation, 28–32, 40, 43 “general thesis of reciprocal perspectives”, 7
experimental, generalization, generalizability, 270, 272–274,
findings, 324, 342–343 280, 420–434, 436–438
physics, 324–325, 342–343 gestalt, 9, 31, 154, 298, 307–308, 317, 489n3
experiments, 400, 488n1 contexture, 316
See also breaching experiments and multimodal, 292–293, 308, 318
demonstrations occasioned, 406
See also psychology psychology, 105
506 Subject Index
gesture, 193, 197–200, 292, 492n4 interaction, 17, 194, 253–256, 259, 264
Gulfport Field history, 478n13 See also atypical interaction
centrality of, 6, 105–106, 264
haecceity, 28, 35, 116, 291, 401, 421, 426, 437 local nature of, 19, 154, 262–263, 273–274
contrasted to quiddity, 28, 116 methodological prescriptions for the study
hermeneutic circle, 9, 48 of, 92, 279
See also “Documentary Method of See also social interaction
Interpretation” interaction order, 92, 253, 263–265, 280, 427
homeless, 167–170, 173–175, 178–181, 184, interactional
485n4 substrate, 446, 448, 456, 460, 468–470
chronically homeless, 169–170, 172–174, what. See missing what
178–179, 181, 485n2 interactionism, 430
human action. See social action interpretation
human computer interaction (HCI), 37–38, quantitative results, 360
398, 400 rules, 12
See also workplace and work practice studies interpretive,
human tools, 203–207 sociology, 27
hybrid studies, 41, 115, 131–132, 341, 478n13, tradition, 27
484n15 interrogative
dialogue, 267
ideal types, framework, 261
logical status and uses of, 71, 76, 79 intersubjectivity, 44, 49, 256, 262, 272, 482n4,
illness, 45, 217 491n3
See also mental illness breakdowns of, 7
image recognition systems, 403, 413 See also breaching experiments and
See also PRISMATICA demonstrations
incongruity, 94, 98, 254, 256, 260, 444 See also trust
See also breaching demonstrations/ invitation sequences, 273, 279
experiments
deontic, 460 jazz music, 39, 117, 127, 143–144, 482n4
See also understanding judgment, 15–16, 23, 81, 164, 491n6
indexical, indexicality, 11, 13–14, 49, 109, 254– judgmental dope. See cultural dope
256, 258–260, 262, 265, 269, 290–291, jury,
293, 297, 302–303, 308, 317, 445, 481n2, project, 8, 393–394
488n2 studies, 3, 7–8, 29, 31–32, 42, 44, 232
See also context See also Garfinkel, Harold
expressions, 13, 36, 235, 240, 350, 428, 436
information apperception test, 105–108 knowledge, 189, 482n6
inquiry. See unmotivated inquiry common-sense. See common-sense
institutional, distribution of, 168–169
accounts, accountability, accounting scientific, 35
practices, 91, 96–97, 102–104 See also social knowledge making
See also accounts
Conversation Analysis (CA), 420, 426, labeling theory, 43–44, 231–232, 234, 241,
428–432, 483n12 243–244
ethnography, 45, 420, 426, 431–432 Pollner’s critique of, 234
fingerprints, 420, 429, 431–433 laminate, laminated, lamination, 193, 196, 200,
instructed actions, 127, 129, 131, 478n13 204
maps and, 31, 128–129, 150, 158, 484n5 action, 191, 194, 198, 201
intelligence, 447 organization, 193–194
artificial, 38, 398 structure, 198–199
See also autistic intelligence language, 188, 198, 205, 207, 241, 289, 291–292
military, 107 concision of, 254
Subject Index 507
contextuality of meaning, 258, 260 Membership Categorization Device (MCD),

flexibility of, 254 20–25, 268, 270, 478n13
use, 1, 13–14, 17, 26, 400 mental disability, 243–245
indexical and reflexive features of, 9, 16 See also disability
law, laws, 32–33, 162, 164–167, 172, 261–262, mental illness, mentally ill, 32, 43, 217
484n1 See also disability
enforcement/application of, 32, 164, 171, 179 methods, methodic, methodically produced,
patterns of enforcement, 13, 168, 178, 181, methodology, 39–42, 115, 118, 125, 129,
184 289–294, 307–308, 318, 348–356, 442,
quality-of-life, 166–167, 172 490n1
violating or violations of the law See also conversation analysis
lead molybdenum sulphide (PbMo6S8), 322– See also ethnomethodology
326, 331, 336, 338–339, 341–343, 345, professions other than sociology, 127, 132
488n2, 489n8, 490n10 See also professions
Lebenswelt pairs, 49, 129–130, 202, 477n12 See also quantitative analysis
legal, 102, 104, 167, 169, 236 See also social science
consciousness, 179 See also sociology
See also crime See also survey research
environment(s), 31–33 technical and vernacular, 118, 144
studies of, 42, 94–95, 102–103 misdemeanors, 167, 409–410, 485n3
See also jury “missing what”, 50, 116–117, 119–120, 127,
See also police, police officer, policing 141–144, 148–151, 153, 157, 159, 443,
linguistic turn, 26 482n4, 484n15
linguistics, 19, 253, 265 Bloor’s critique of sociology of knowledge
Livingston, Eric and, 120
on characterization problem, 124–125 Garfinkel’s conception of, 50, 143
on mathematical proving, 36, 483n10 mixed-method research, 357–363, 365–366
local spectroscopy, 323–324, 326, 328, 331–340, morality, 23, 29, 94–95, 103, 110, 162, 184, 232
342 multi-band superconductivity, 322, 324–326,
London Underground, 402–408, 410–411, 414 339, 341–343, 345, 488n2, 490n10
See also transit networks multimodality, multimodal, 308
Los Angeles, 267, 434 analysis, 19, 35–36, 289, 291–292, 294, 308,
Suicide Prevention Center (SPC), 40, 148– 317–318
149, 258, 272 See also gestalt
See also University of California Los Angeles organization, 295–296
resources, 291–294, 307, 318
machinery, 290 transcription, 296, 298
mala in se offenses, 167, 169, 171 See also ELAN
mala prohibita offenses, 167, 169, 171, 178
Mannheim, Karl, 8, 48, 257, 258 narrative, 22, 102, 111, 149, 269, 389, 444
See also “Documentary Method of psychology, 105, 107, 111
Interpretation” natural attitude, 79, 221, 233
See also Strong Programme See also “epoché of the natural attitude”
manuals, 143–145, 483n11, 484n5, 490n1 natural availability, 145, 148–149
meaning, meaning-making, 6, 10, 26, 28, 43, 84, naturalistic research, 254, 260, 262, 264, 269,
92, 106–107, 109, 193, 200 280
See also language naturally organized,
medicine, 214, 216–217, 219–220, 225 activities, 124–125, 141–142, 157
membership, phenomena, 141
analysis, 23 navigation, 406–409, 411–413
categories, 20–21, 23, 478n13 next turn proof procedure, 19
Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA), nominalism, 437
17, 20–26, 241–243 “normal appearances”, 409–410
508 Subject Index
norms, normative, normative structure, 5–6, 11, practice-based video analysis, 324–325
23, 28, 163–165 practice, practices, 16, 18, 28, 30, 51, 92–94, 115,
ethnomethodological respecification of, 8, 164–165, 173, 185, 442–444, 448, 456,
11–14, 16, 31, 49, 162, 165, 184, 235–236 469–470
expectations, 163 praxeological, 123, 368, 380, 389
legitimacy of, 5 analysis, 293
See also rules field
normative paradigm, 11–12, 14, 162–164, 184 focal distance, 389, 392
noticing, foregrounding, 389, 391, 395
departure point for analysis, 259, 293–294 coherence and coherence of detail, 389, 393
members’ work, 295–298, 300, 306–309, 313, reasoning, 42
316–317, 412 pragmatism, 261, 477n8
See also unmotivated inquiry predicates, accidental, spurious, or bogus,
identifiability of, 360
observer preference organization, preference structure,
role of, 71, 79, 80–81, 85 25–26, 274–276, 488n5
Occam’s Razor, 420–422, 437 for agreement, 278
offer sequences, 279 for contiguity, 276
ontological gerrymandering, 487n1 principled resolutions to recurrent
operations room, 402, 409 methodological problems,
“order at all points”, 265 absence of, 350
orderliness, 87, 92, 289–292, 317 PRISMATICA, 403, 405, 413–414
organization deployment, 405, 408–409, 412 See also image recognition systems
organizational, problem of order, 71, 85, 154
achievement, 154 Hobbesian, 5–6
activity, 151 See also voluntaristic theory of action
items, objects, 150–152, 156–158 Garfinkel’s respecification, 5–6, 162
reasoning, 148 de facto,
setting(s), 38 within Parsonian framework, 88
See also workplace and work practice within Schützian framework, 89
studies premises of conduct,
organizations, 36–37, 236 within Parsonian framework, 89
overcrowding, 405–408 within Schützian framework, 89
process, processes, 162–163, 257, 281
participation framework, 199 professional video, 402
passing, 91, 218, 232, 237, 259, 487n4 professional vision, 207–208, 316–317
peacekeeping, 32, 165, 184 professions, 115–117, 120, 123–124
perspicuous, 45, 193, 341, 348 ‘anti-professionalism’ in social science and
setting, 295, 358, 401–402 humanities, 118
phenomenology, phenomenological, 2–4, 35, progressivity, 303–304, 306–307, 317, 492n2
43, 80–82, 122, 130, 254, 256, 260, 280 delayed, 445
“bracketing”, 43, 224 projection, projectability, 297–298, 302, 307,
pointing, 292, 295, 302–303 311–312, 316
police, police officer, policing, 33, 165–176, prosody, 190–191, 193, 195–196
178–185, 484n1, 485nn3–4 pseudo-cleft, 297–298, 302–303, 306–308, 310,
law enforcement officials, 167 312, 316
police-able matters/conduct, 168, 178 psychiatric, psychiatry, 215, 217, 224
police scrutiny, 176 Psychoeducational Profile (PEP), 457, 467
practical, psychological, psychology, 448–449
action, 114–116, 141–143, 149–150, 159, 162 cultural, 111
actor, 159 discursive, 23–24
exigencies, 41 experimentation, 371, 394, 396
logic, 445 See also reasoning
Subject Index 509
public announcements, 409–410 rule(s), 27–28, 37, 43, 162–168, 170, 174, 178,
public behavior, 401–402 184, 232, 293, 398–399, 481n2, 481n9
public focus of attention, 200 accountable to, 165
Purdue symposium on ethnomethodology, 7 basic, 10
determinacy of, 8, 11
quantitative research methods, quantitative ethnomethodological respecification of, 8,
analysis, 348–349, 355, 359–362, 490n4, 11–14, 16, 30–31, 49, 162–164, 184
491n8 flexibility of, 12
question-answer sequences, 270, 276, implementation of, 29–30, 38
277–279 interpretation of, 12
moral accountability, 162, 170, 172
race, racism, 24–26, 45, 47–48, 90, 92–95, See also norms
97–104, 110, 241–242, 479n1, 480n8, See also trust
481n10, 487n4
rationality, 84, 163 scaffolding, 446
common-sense, 239 scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), 324–326,
See also common-sense 331, 336, 489n6
See also reasoning science,
scientific, 239 social studies of, 482n5, 491n1
sociology of error, 86, 119 See also science and technology studies (STS)
realism, 437 and technology, 16, 34, 42
reality disjunctures, 444 Lebenswelt origins of, 35
reasoning, 48 see also Workplace Studies
collaborative production of, 38, 45, 395 science and technology studies (STS), 34–37,
literal texts vs hypothetical conjectures, 39, 42, 114, 119
383–384 scientific discovery, 35
See also common-sense second-order constructs, 118
deductive, 163 self, 90, 91, 109–110
indexical and reflexive features of, 9, 11 territories of, 444
practical and situated, 10, 16, 149–150, 159 semiosis, 193
problem-solving, 375, 381 cooperative, 198
psychological experimentation, 371 semiotic, 208–209
See also psychology entities, 357
See also experimentation field, 193, 196–200
See also rationality materials, 188, 194, 196, 198, 201
scientific, 42, 233 resources, 36, 192, 198, 200, 486n4
reciprocal perspectives. See “general thesis of structure, 189, 193, 201, 486n6
reciprocal perspectives” sequence, sequentiality, sequencing, sequential,
recognition, recognizable, recognizability, 9, 19, 20, 23, 49, 408–409
290–291, 293–294, 318 analysis, 49
record-keeping, 41 organization of action, 49, 254, 262, 269, 445,
reflexive accountability. See accountability, 487–488n1
accountable setting, perspicuous setting, 290, 295
reflexivity, 9, 16, 30, 49, 91, 153, 258, 274, 279, sense, sense-making, 6, 8, 45, 49, 92, 98, 109–110,
308, 316–317, 344, 481n2 406, 408–409, 444, 460, 493n11
relevance(s) See also common-sense knowledge and
congruency of, 76, 444 reasoning
problem of, 78, 125 sex, sex status, 214–218, 221–225, 486n1, 487nn6–7
See also characterization problem sherlock experiment, 371–397
repair, 18–19, 25, 488n4 situated, 32, 290–291, 293
request sequences, 279 knowledge. See knowledge
research procedures. See methods practice, 208–209
roles, 27–28, 163, 221–224 See also practice
510 Subject Index
situatedness, 289, 292 See also science and technology studies

situation (STS)
definition of, 83–84 space, 295
ethnomethodological respecification of, 12 interactional, 295, 300–302, 311–312,
“situation of action”, 12, 80–82, 86 316–317
See also situation public, 401–404
social action, social events, 4, 49, 103, 106, 125, specimen collections, 264, 267, 272, 274–275,
162–163, 184, 188–190, 192–193, 196, 277, 279, 488n1
198–201, 203–206, 209, 232, 290–293, stance, 194–198
308, 398–399, 487n1 standardization, 456–457, 462–463
See also action in interaction, 42
constitution of, 16, 22, 162 statistics, statistical, 43, 91, 95, 491n6
implementation of, 18 accounts, 102–104
moral dimensions of, 92, 162, 184 analysis, 40, 103–104, 348, 350
normative regulation of, 11 See also methods
social construction, social constructionism, 34, Strong Programme, 34, 119, 482n6
44, 46, 238, 243, 487n1 See also symmetry
critique of, 24 structure-preserving transformative operations,
social fact(s), 91–93, 97, 110, 155–156, 159, 228, 188, 191, 203
479n1 “subjective” categories, logical status and uses
constitution of, 12, 14–15, 111 of, 71, 84–85
determination of, 42 substitutability of objective for indexical
social interaction. See interaction expressions
social knowledge making, 348, 352–353 unrealisable promise of, 350
social learning, 207, 447 substrate, 189–193, 203
social practice, 189, 207 public, 188–189, 201, 209
social problem(s), 39, 42–44, 103, 227–231, See also interactional
236–243, 245, 277, 487n1 suicide, 14–16, 20, 40, 44, 236, 266–268, 270,
See also deviance 478n14
See also disability See also Los Angeles Suicide Prevention
ethnomethodological respecification of, 44 Center (SPC)
See also suicide surveillance, 401–404, 411, 413
social psychology, 24 survey research, 39–42, 350, 358–361, 491n7
social sciences, 253, 258, 260 and coding, 40–41
critiques of methods, See also methods
within the social sciences, 266, 348, See also Workplace Studies, record-keeping
350–351 symbolic interactionism, 26–28, 477n7
See also methods symmetry, 119, 121, 339–340
social structure, 108, 110, 148, 150, 158, 230, See also actor-network theory (ANT)
233, 253, 355, 360 second axis of, 121
sociology, 1, 4, 17, 19, 27, 31, 36, 40, 43, 47, See also Strong Programme
90–91, 93–95, 104–105, 110, 114–115,
117–121, 123, 127–128, 132, 148, 153– tacit,
154, 228, 230–231, 234, 238, 240–241, agreement(s), 168, 171, 178–179, 181, 183,
243, 245, 350–353, 356, 367, 442–443, 185
480n8, 481nn1–2, 482n4, 482n9, 484n15, assumptions, expectations, presuppositions,
486nn1–2, 487n4, 487n6, 490n1, 490n4 presumptions, 3–4, 90, 96–99, 101–103,
See also ethnomethodology 107–109
feminist, 45, 214–215, 225 conditions, 108–109
See also gender interpretation, 49
knowledge, 482n5 practices, 39
scientific knowledge (SSK), science, 24, taken-for-granted, 90, 92, 102, 109
34–35, 119–121, 349, 482n5 interactional processes, 97–99
Subject Index 511
See also common-sense knowledge and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA),
reasoning 2, 477n7
temporal character, 404 gender clinic, 16, 214–216
temporality, 36, 78–79, 87–89, 311, 316 See also Los Angeles
testing, 108–109, 448–467, 468–470, 493nn11– understanding, 49, 258, 262, 272
12, 493n14, 493n17 displaying, 259, 262, 281
textures of detail, 388 incongruity, 6, 23
theory of mind, 468 unique adequacy, 121–125, 155, 481–482n2,
theory of objects, 484n15
Parsons, 71–72, 77–79, 81, 84 adequacy, postulate of in sociological
Schütz, 71–72, 77–79, 81 methodology, 122
theory of reality, and actor’s point of view, 122, 123
coherence theory, 479n4 See also characterization problem
congruence theory, 72–76, 479n4 and thick description, 125
correspondence theory, 72–76, 84, 86, unmotivated inquiry, 293–294
479nn3–4 utilitarian theories of social action, 162
multiple realities, 74–75
topic/resource distinction, 230, 233, 235–236, value(s), 5, 23, 229, 231, 233, 235–236, 241, 243
239–241 ethnomethodological respecification of, 49,
traffic, 155 235–236
engineering, 146–147 neutrality, 227, 229–230
trans rights, 225 vehicular unit, 299
transcripts, transcription, 265, 267, 280, 296, vernacular, 118, 144, 152–153, 156, 240
298, 489n4 accounts and ethnomethodology, 118
transformative operations, 191, 196, 203, 209 laboratory, 118
transgender, transsexual, 46, 48, 91, 96, 214, video, 289, 291, 295–296
216–217, 220, 223, 225, 479n1, 480n6 Vienna school, 163
See also Agnes vision, 295, 298, 307, 317
transgender media representation, 225 See also professional vision
See also documentary, Framing Agnes voluntaristic theory of action, 4–5, 86
transit networks, 402–412
See also London Underground “with”, 299
trust, trust conditions, 16, 47, 49, 90, 92, 95, 99, workplace and work practice studies, 34–37,
102, 105, 107, 109–111, 221–222, 442, 39, 114–117, 119–122, 124, 126–127,
444, 452, 479n1 131–132, 399, 477–478n13, 483n12
See also breaching experiments and cognition, distributed cognition and, 37–38
demonstrations See also computer-supported cooperative
See also Garfinkel, Harold work (CSCW)
Garfinkel’s conception of, 7 See also human-computer interaction (HCI)
See also “general thesis of reciprocal See also organizations
perspectives” See also science
turn-taking, 18, 151, 275, 280, 445 See also workscapes
tutorial problem, 325–326, 329, 331, 336, 342 workscapes, 37

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1. Ethnomethodology’s Legacies and Prospects  1

2. A Comparison of Decisions Made on Four “Pre-​Theoretical”

5. Sources of Issues and Ways of Working: An Introduction to

9. Garfinkel, Social Problems, and Deviance: Reflections on

11. The Situated and Methodic Production of Accountable Action:

Anne Warfield Rawls

It is now a little over 50 years since Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology

At least two important theoretical developments stem from the researches

the nature of intersubjectivity, and the social constitution of knowledge—​that

Early Life and Work in North Carolina

The first of these, “Color Trouble” (Garfinkel 1941), was a quasi-​ethnographic

After war service (1942–​1945), Garfinkel entered Harvard to work on a PhD

theory of action.” This perspective was designed to address the Hobbesian

From his arrival in Cambridge in 1946, Garfinkel began a process of amending

University of California, Los Angeles

As Garfinkel recounted at the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology (Hill and

Core Aspects of Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology

The “Documentary Method of Interpretation”

Common to all these methods of practical reasoning, however, were certain

of the “hermeneutic circle” explored in German historiography and elsewhere

The method consists of treating an actual appearance as “the document of,”

These features of the documentary method would later be characterized as the

“Trust” and the Constitution of Social Acts

surmised that the procedures undermined a set of “more fundamental”

The implication of this constitutive approach to normative structure and so-

Social Action and Its Normative Background

The ubiquity of the documentary method in human affairs is associated with

and social conduct. The paradigm modeled participants as entering a setting

a description, for example, in the ways it may be a constituent part of the

Garfinkel understood human action to be necessarily caught in a web of account-

Ethnomethodology’s Legacies I: Language Use and

By the time Studies in Ethnomethodology appeared in 1967, Garfinkel (1967d:xiii)

By far the most prominent of ethnomethodology’s legacies is the approach to

influential were Sacks’s then-​unpublished lectures, which Gail Jefferson tran-

CA adopts an ethnomethodological conception of social activity in which the

. . . it is not any particular conversation, as an object, that we are primarily in-

Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA)

associated with gender to depict Betty as outnumbered by four untidy brothers

The Morality of Discourse

MCA, Gender, and Race

Ethnomethodology’s Legacies II: Ethnographic Inquiry and

Notwithstanding Garfinkel’s close theoretical connections to Parsons

Ethnomethodology and Ethnographic Inquiry

Although there are ethnographers who draw on ethnomethodology (Emerson

rule usage according to situated contingencies. Denzin (1970:271), a symbolic

Excavation in Ethnographic Ethnomethodology

stressed the normative and moral aspects of accountability, they largely

. . . more preoccupied with the problem of assigning outcomes their legitimate

Among the classic ethnographic, ethnomethodological studies that are a funda-

decision-​making practices by which they preserved a sense of administrative

Studies of Legal Environments

1. Ethnomethodology’s Legacies and Prospects 1

2. A Comparison of Decisions Made on Four “Pre-Theoretical”

5. Sources of Issues and Ways of Working: An Introduction to

9. Garfinkel, Social Problems, and Deviance: Reflections on

11. The Situated and Methodic Production of Accountable Action:

the nature of intersubjectivity, and the social constitution of knowledge—that

The first of these, “Color Trouble” (Garfinkel 1941), was a quasi-ethnographic

After war service (1942–1945), Garfinkel entered Harvard to work on a PhD

influential were Sacks’s then-unpublished lectures, which Gail Jefferson tran-

decision-making practices by which they preserved a sense of administrative

among practitioners, whose work-related actions are a collective, collaborative

(1986) study of police record-keeping, Heath and Luff ’s (2000:Chapter 2) re-

In turn, as Schneider (2019:184) has observed, the Cicourel-Kitsuse collab-

labeling theory aims to critique “common-sense” versions of social problems and

McKinney and E. A. Tiryakian. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Educational

In the order in which they will be considered, the “pre-theoretical” problems

accordance with logico-empirical procedures, these procedures being the guar-

embedded in frames and framing (Garfinkel [1947] 2012:33, 1948b, 2006:142–

To understand why the foundational premise of Garfinkel’s position—that

“Inter-Racial and Intra-Racial Homicide,” 1942: Racialized

During his third semester at Harvard in the winter/spring of 1947, Garfinkel

There were 10 subjects who cooperated in an in-depth interviewing process and