ABSTRACT
Sociology seems to have reached an impass. Postmodernism—a category into which writers as diverse as Baudrillard, Debord, de Certeau, Foucault, and Lyotard are lumped together, along with who knows how many others, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan and perhaps even Montaigne and Shakespeare—has shown people the limitations of modernist thought and methods. Yet the enthusiasm for postmodernism in making available to the disciplines their own practices has given way to the recognition that, in terms of the methods that are actually employed, not much has changed and, in fact, almost everything has remained the same. While ethnomethodology has illuminated the inner dynamics of disciplinary sociology and has opened up the world of practical action and reasoning for re-examination, it has been less successful in developing anything like an alternative technology for conducting studies of the domain-specific skill and the reasoning.
