ABSTRACT
At the beginning of this book I mentioned the sometimes difficult relationship between ethnomethodology and sociology. It was noted that well-known social scientists, such as Ernest Gellner and Lewis Coser, saw nothing of value in the ethnomethodological program. And, at times ethnomethodologists did not help their standing within sociology when they “formulated many of its [ethnomethodology’s] own notions partly in polemical opposition to certain presuppositions of the main stream of conventional sociology” (Wilson and Zimmerman 1979: 53). Suggestions, however, that Garfinkel and ethnomethodology would have no interest in, and no contribution to make to, sociological debates and sociological theory are misguided. As I have demonstrated in reference to Garfinkel’s analyses in the 1940s and 1950s, Garfinkel had an immense interest in sociological theory and in foundational sociological questions such as the question of social order. This early interest in sociological theory was reflected in Garfinkel’s description of his excitement when opening his copy of Parsons’ The Social Structure of Action (1937) in the late 1930s: “[H]e says that he can still remember sitting in the backyard fingering the book, smelling the newness of its pages” (Garfinkel in Rawls 2002: 13).
