ABSTRACT
Ethnomethodology is the study of practical action and practical reasoning. Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) studies of jurors, coroners, and social science researchers set the agenda by describing the accomplishment of relevant tasks in specific situations. In addition to presenting empirical research on situated practices, Garfinkel’s writings develop a praxiological orientation to the classic problems and topics in philosophy and the human sciences.1 These topics include language, knowledge, trust, reasoning, meaning, normative order, rationality, method, etc. (and ‘etc.’ itself is a name Garfinkel gives to an ad hoc practice). Simply put, this praxiological orientation is a matter of treating these topics not as ontological entities, foundational processes, parts of society, social structures, cultural systems, behavioral mechanisms, or cognitive faculties, but as situated accomplishments by the parties whose local practices ‘assemble’ the recurrent scenes of action that make up a stable society. So, for example, when described ethnomethodologically, discourse becomes a practically organized phenomenon: a coordinated assembly of what is said, and by whom, in particular circumstances. When treated in this way, social order becomes an array of practical, self-organizing and selfinvestigating phenomena. What is at stake is not the theoretical problem of order, but the substantive production of order on singular occasions. As Garfinkel (1991:11) puts it in characteristic fashion, ‘sociology’s fundamental phenomenon’ of the ‘objective reality of social facts’ is ‘every society’s locally, endogenously produced, naturally organised, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work, with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buy-outs.’ This ‘stunning vision of society as a practical achievement’ is not original to ethnomethodology. It is central to the entire tradition of social theory from Hobbes to Parsons.2 No less central is ‘the vexed problem of the practical objectivity and practical observability of practical actions and practical reasoning,’ which provides a constant and unfinished task for social theory; a problem that ‘because it was vexed, serve[d] as the standing source and grounds for the adequacy of theorising’s claims’ (Garfinkel 1991:11).3 If reactions to ethnomethodology are any indication, it can be exceedingly difficult to understand the scope and implications of this ‘vexed problem of the practical
objectivity and practical observability of practical actions and practical reasoning’ and, in this essay, I shall discuss how it is brought into relief by the very idea of ethnomethodology. I will then attempt to show how that problem is pertinent to contemporary efforts by social theorists to put practice(s) on the agenda.
