ABSTRACT
The remarks that follow focus on the underlying structure of Norman K. Denzin’s discussion of ethnomethodology, and in particular on his assertion that both ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism are fundamentally concerned with the problems. The ethnomethodologist treats the fact that he lives and acts within the same social world that he investigates in quite a different way than do the varieties of traditional sociologists. The radical claim thus emerges and is embodied in the doctrine which directs the sociologist to bring everyday accounting practices under investigation as phenomena in their own right. Ethnomethodologists, in direct contrast, ask a different order of question about the apparent orderliness or patterned nature of the social world as it appears in daily life and in sociological accounts. The distinction between the account or description and the thing accounted for or described is an essentially unexamined resource for laymen and sociologists, for on this distinction rests the “orderly structure” of the social world.
