ABSTRACT
It is quite surprising that despite its fifty-year history, sociological textbooks still primarily see ethnomethodology as being concerned with breaching experiments and conversation analysis (cf. Appelrouth and Edles 2008). They also discuss it together with phenomenological sociology, symbolic interactionism, and cognate micro-theories of action, already strongly criticized by Garfinkel in his early work. By linking ethnomethodology to other theories of action and micro-sociology and by focusing on the breaching experiments and conversation analysis, these textbooks ignore not only Garfinkel’s position in relation to those sociological traditions, but also the varieties of ethnomethodology that have developed since the 1960s (Maynard and Clayman 1991). They also neglect to take into consideration the influence of ethnomethodology on other disciplines and areas of research. Some of these areas are briefly covered in this chapter.
