Phenomenological analyses of the orderliness of naturally occurring collaboration.

Winner of the 2015 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section of the American Sociological Association Winner of the 2015 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section of the American Sociological Association Pioneered by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s and '60s, ethnomethodology is a sociological approach rooted in phenomenology that is concerned with investigating the unspoken rules according to which people understand and create order in unstructured situations. Based on more than thirty years of teaching ethnomethodology, Kenneth Liberman—himself a student of Garfinkel's—provides an up-to-date introduction through a series of classroom-based studies. Each chapter focuses on a routine experience in which people collaborate to make sense of and coordinate an unscripted activity: organizing the coherence of the rules of a game, describing the objective taste of a cup of gourmet coffee, making sense of intercultural conversation, reading a vague map, and finding order amidst chaotic traffic flow. Detailed descriptions of the kinds of ironies that naturally arise in these and other ordinary affairs breathe new life into phenomenological theorizing and sociological understanding.

Since the 1967 publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel has indelibly influenced the social sciences and humanities worldwide. This new book, the long-awaited sequel to Studies, comprises Garfinkel's work over three decades to further elaborate the study of ethnomethodology. 'Working out Durkheim's Aphorism, ' the title used for this new book, emphasizes Garfinkel's insistence that his position focuses on fundamental sociological issues--and that interpretations of his position as indifferent to sociology have been misunderstandings. Durkheim's aphorism states that the concreteness of social facts is sociology's most fundamental phenomenon. Garfinkel argues that sociologists have, for a century or more, ignored this aphorism and treated social facts as theoretical, or conceptual, constructions. Garfinkel in this new book shows how and why sociology must restore Durkheim's aphorism, through an insistence on the concreteness of social facts that are produced by complex social practices enacted by participants in the social order. Garfinkel's new book, like Studies, will likely stand as another landmark in sociological theory, yet it is clearer and more concrete in revealing human social practices.

This book is a concise intellectual biography of Harold Garfinkel, a key figure in 20th-century social science, and a basic description of ethnomethodology, a research tradition that he created.

Understanding Qualitative Research and Ethnomethodology provides a discussion of qualitative research methods from an ethnomethodological perspective. Detailed yet concise, Paul ten Have′s text explores the complex relation between the more traditional methods of qualitative social research and the discipline of ethnomethodology. It draws on examples from both ethnomethodological studies and the wider field of qualitative research to discuss critically an array of methods for qualitative data collection and analysis. With a student-friendly structure, this engaging book will be an invaluable resource for both students and researchers across the social sciences.

This book offers a new and rigorous approach to observational sociology that is grounded in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Throughout the authors encourage the reader to explore the social world at first hand, beginning with the immediate family context and then moving out into the public realm and organizational life. Examples of observational analysis are given with reference to topic areas such as family life, education, medicine, crime and deviance, and the reader is shown how to conduct their own inquiries, using methods and materials that are readily and ordinarily available. Drawing on both original material and published studies, Francis and Hester demonstrate how observational sociology can be carried out with an attention to detail typically overlooked by more traditional ethonographic approaches.

Although not widely known, Harold Garfinkel pioneered the use of ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology. He influenced generations of scholars and researchers.This expanded and updated edition of Garfinkel's classic Studies in Ethnomethodology includes, for the first time, additional Garfinkel papers that helped form the author's ideas.This is the fullest and most authoritative edition ever published. It gives readers a chance to see how Garfinkel developed his path-breaking ideas and later expanded them into new lines of thought.

In possibly the first anthology of studies of mass media texts from an ethnometholodogical perspective, US and UK academics apply competing theories and methods to analyze how media texts of various genres operate. The nine contributions offer visual sociology deconstructions of such topics as: testimony vs. evidence at the Iran-Contra hearings, organizational features of a radio talk show, and the new French theory of media. Includes bandw images of diverse subjects: e.g. a 1960 Democratic presidential primary, a Yanomamo Village ax fight, and TV news interpretations of snipers in Bosnia. Appends transcription conventions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Through its empirical inquiries into the ordered properties of social action, this text demonstrates how ethnomethodology provides a radical respecification of the foundations of the human sciences, an achievement that has often been misunderstood.