Brooker2025
| Brooker2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Brooker2025 |
| Author(s) | Phillip Brooker |
| Title | The Unique Adequacy Requirement of Methods |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Unique Adequacy Requirement |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| Pages | 206–213 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-20 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 17 |
Abstract
This chapter opens with a simple premise: if you want to understand what people do and why they do it, why on Earth would you ask a sociologist about it before asking them? From here, the chapter will outline the unique adequacy requirement of methods (UAR), starting with what is arguably its most definitive statement in a joint publication by Harold Garfinkel and Lawerence Wieder and demonstrations of its application in the work of David Sudnow and Stacy Burns. Proceeding further backwards, the chapter will explore the lineage of the idea: its relationship to Garfinkel’s policy of ethnomethodological indifference, its status as an implication of Winch’s work on sociological explanation, its origins in the “anti-scientism” of Wittgenstein’s Ordinary Language Philosophy, and its reflection of Schutz’ characterisation of sociology as a “second-order discipline”. At this point, the chapter will review the UAR by restating what is it for, in terms of what satisfying such a requirement can afford us as social researchers, and commenting on its position as a key point of bifurcation between ethnomethodology and “mainstream” sociological inquiry.
Notes
