ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines only three sociological accounts: symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and actor-network-theory. Herbert Blumer, who first coined the term, provides a very clear definition of this sociological way of working. It is worth quoting this definition in full in order to be able to understand its conceptualization of everyday life. Human group life on the level of symbolic interaction is a vast process in which people are forming, sustaining, and transforming the objects of their world as they come to give meaning to objects. According to Blumer, everyday life is constructed out of the many lines of action that are a consequence of people interacting with each other and with the objects that surround them. According to Bruno Latour, actor-network-theory is simply another way of being faithful to the insights of ethnomethodology: actors know what they do and they have to learn from them not only what they do, but how and why they do it.
