Lynch2025
| Lynch2025 | |
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| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Lynch2025 |
| Author(s) | Michael Lynch |
| Title | Ethnomethodology |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-3 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 2 |
Abstract
The term “ethnomethodology” was coined in the 1950s by Harold Garfinkel, the acknowledged founder of the field, but it did not become widely familiar until the publication in 1967 of his magnum opus, Studies in Ethnomethodology. Since then, the question “What is ethnomethodology?” has been persistently asked, answered, and evaded. Simply put, ethnomethodology is the study of the production of social order in and through continuous courses of embodied action and social interaction. One reason for confusion about the term is that it is both the name of a field – originally a subfield of sociology, which has developed as a field in its own right with connections to philosophy of social science, sociolinguistics, information science, science and technology studies, among other academic disciplines – and the name of the phenomenon of interest: literally, “folk methodologies” for achieving social activities of all kinds. Ethnomethodology itself involves methodic practices for studying social actions and interactional practices, but it does not conceive of methodology (its own, or the methodologies studied) as a recipe book of procedures independent of their enactment. Instead, it investigates how methods take form and are reflexively bound up in the social situations in which they are performed. This chapter discusses how ethnomethodology addresses the reflexive relationship between actions and social settings, and briefly reviews developments in the field during the past half-century.
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