ABSTRACT
The Ethnomethodology at Work explores the contribution that ethnomethodological studies continue to make one's understanding of the ways in which people actually accomplish work from day to day. Calculation has been elevated beyond the ordinary by the centrality of rationality in Western thought. 'subjecting pupils' achievements in schools to 'objective' forms of calculation ostensibly enables the relevant authorities to quantitatively express the quality of schools in an area so informing parental choices of which school to send their child. Such calculations serve the rational decision making of parents; help identify where investments need to be made by government and local authorities; indirectly, but sometimes directly, provide evidence on the quality of the teaching in the school. Economic calculation 'in the raw', so to speak is never a matter of running through the calculations but is permeated through and through by qualitative judgements which have their logic not in a mathematical model of profitability but in experience and judgement.
