ShermanHeckler2025
| ShermanHeckler2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | ShermanHeckler2025 |
| Author(s) | Wendy Sherman Heckler |
| Title | Instructed Action, in and as Ethnomethodology |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Instructed Action |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| Pages | 276–284 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-27 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 23 |
Abstract
Instructions and instructed action are recommended on the one hand as a topic of inquiry. From the perspective of ethnomethodology, there is an indissoluble tie between the many variants and forms of what we might call instructions, and their practical enactment. Whereas formal analysis may assess or evaluate the correspondence between instructions and the phenomena they represent, Garfinkel encourages us to take interest in just what instructed actions come to look like, in vivo. Instructions (and thus, their enactments) are present in numerous ordinary activities available for investigation in this way, and exemplary EM studies will be recounted and summarised. However, Garfinkel also references “instructions” in advising how one is to read ethnomethodological description: “Misreading texts as instructions is the key to exhibiting the ‘achieved’ phenomenal field details of practical action”. The unique adequacy of accounts is, for EM, not the formal analytic concern over errors in correspondence with reality, but rather, whether the “text can be read instructionally as the instructed course of doing”. Put differently, description in EM studies – as instructions for seeing – is concerned “not with the efficacy of the enterprises, but the worldliness of the enterprises”.
Notes
