Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology, literally “the study of ethnomethods” or “members' methods,” derives from a collection of investigations conducted by University of California, Los Angeles, sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s and 1960s, published in 1967 under the title Studies in Ethnomethodology, which is universally taken to be ethnomethodology's foundational text. The term “ethnomethodology,” coined by Garfinkel in tandem with his readings of the ethnoscience literature in anthropology, names investigations into an empirical domain of concrete social practices essential to, and productive of, the perceived stability of everyday practical action and practical reasoning. Accordingly, ethnomethodologists are directed to a specific topic or subject area: empirical practices whereby people find themselves in orderly, everyday, and familiar social circumstances in whose terms they can regularly display ordinary social competence. Generally, ...