ABSTRACT

I now situate CA explicitly within the intellectual tradition of ethnomethodology, as it is the ethnomethodological foundations of CA that set it apart from other ACDs (Button, 1991; Heritage, 1987; Taylor & Cameron, 1987). According to Roger and Bull (1988):

The term “ethnomethodology” was coined by Garfinkel (1974). In combining the words “ethno” and “methodology,” Garfinkel was influenced by the use of such terms as “ethnobotany” and “ethnomedicine” to refer to folk systems of botanical and medical analysis. What is proposed is that any competent member of society (including the professional social scientist) is equipped with a methodology for analysing social phenomena; the term “ethnomethodology” thus refers to the study of ways in which everyday common-sense activities are analysed by participants, and of the ways in which these analyses are incorporated into courses of action. The most prominent development within ethnomethodology is undoubtedly that which has become known as conversation analysis, which examines the procedures used in the production of ordinary conversation. The influence of conversation analysis is being increasingly felt in disciplines outside sociology, notably psychology,

linguistics1 and anthropology. (P. 3)

More specifically, ethnomethodology is the product of a marriage between two seemingly incompatible intellectual perspectives, the hermeneutic-dialectic and the logico-analytic (Heritage, 1987; Mehan, 1978; Mehan & Wood, 1975). From the former, it borrowed its theoretical interest in folk ways of making sense of the world; from the latter, it took its empirically based methodology. As Mehan (1978) commented:

one of Garfinkel’s (1967) seminal contributions was to translate the idealistic and subjectivistic notions associated with the phenomenological branch of the hermeneutic-dialectic tradition into the realm of the social by exhorting researchers to find in the interaction between people, not in their subjective states, the processes that assemble the concerted activities of everyday life. (p. 60)

Based on these characterizations, I define CA as a form of ACD that accounts for the sequential structure of talk-in-interaction in terms of interlocutors’ real-time orientations to the preferential practices that underlie, for participants and consequently also for analysts, the conversational behaviors of turn-taking and repair in different speech exchange systems.