ABSTRACT
Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011) was the founder of the field of Ethnomethodology: the sociological study of the production and organization of practical actions and practical reasoning. Many of Garfinkel’s studies concerned commonsense practical reasoning and everyday actions, but in the last several decades of his life, he and his students took an interest in the work of scientists and mathematicians. Part I of this volume is an edited draft of an unpublished manuscript of Garfinkel’s that he wrote in the late 1980s. Part II is made up of edited seminar transcripts from a series of five seminars he conducted in 1980 on “discovering work in the sciences.” This Editor’s Introduction presents a summary of the materials in the volume, and places them in the context of developments in the fields of ethnomethodology and social studies of science.
