Respecifying the Study of Social Order—Garfi nkel’s Transition from Theoretical Conceptualization to Practices in Details

Harold Garfi nkel’s attempt to redirect attention toward the lived details of enacted practice through the study of “ethnomethods” (folk methods) for accomplishing practical activities has come increasingly to infl uence contemporary studies of situated social practice and is emerging as one of the more important arguments of the latter twentieth century. Indeed, studies of workplace practices, and communities of practice,1 are increasingly infl uential in business, science and technology, computer science and AI (artifi cial intelligence), as well as in sociology and other academic disciplines.