ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to provide practical activities, practical circumstances and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually afforded extraordinary events. With respect to the study of crime, ethnomethodology, like symbolic interactionism, treats crime as a matter of actors' definitional or interpretative work or, more precisely, as a product of members' methods of practical reasoning. However, unlike symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology is concerned with the situated production and use of these definitions rather than treating these as given in the fabric of local settings. Drawing on the phenomenological social philosophy of Schutz, Garfinkel's early work consists of a series of demonstrations of the thesis that social order is a moral and cognitive phenomenon constituted through members' methods of practical reasoning. Smith's criminality is the interactional accomplishment of the criminal justice system's management of practical contingencies.
