ABSTRACT

This chapter concerns the status and use of bibliographies as objects of practical academic theorizing. It shows how the local organization of bibliographies is a phenomenon of ethnomethodological (EM) respecification. The chapter reviews Harold Garfinkel's corpus as an example of practical reasoning in the recognition of a corpus. It takes competent membership as academic practice, namely competent viewing and competent reading as constituent features of research projects. Counting bibliographic items is known variously as 'bibliometry' and 'citation analysis'. Respecification of bibliographic methods topicalizes and makes available aspects of social organization to rigorous inquiry. Bibliographies may be invoked as proxies for critical literature reviews and bibliographic sets, or accorded corpus status. Garfinkel, as compiler of the bibliography, bibliographicizes the corpus that constitutes the alternate literature, which hold corpus status as studies of members' lived experiences. Garfinkel and Sudnow initiate investigation into the phenomenon of the availability of the constitutive activities of lecturing.