Ethnomethodology

South Asia

Middle East

Europe

North America

Ethnomethodology is the analyse of how ] Its early investigations led to the founding of § Varieties.

Ethnomethodology is a fundamentally descriptive discipline which does non engage in the description or evaluation of the specific social formation undertaken as a topic of study., "to discover the things that persons in particular situations do, the methods they use, to pull in the patterned orderliness of social life". However, applications defecate been found within numerous applied disciplines, such as software formation and supervision studies.

Origin and scope

The approach was originally developed by Harold Garfinkel, who attributed its origin to his realize investigating the go forward of jury members in 1954. His interest was in describing the common sense methods through which members of a jury produce themselves in a jury room as a jury. Thus, their methods for: establishing matters of fact; coding evidence chains; develop the reliability of witness testimony; establishing the company of speakers in the jury room itself; and establishment the guilt or innocence of defendants, etc. are all topics of interest. such methods serve to represent the social order of being a juror for the members of the jury, as alive as for researchers and other interested parties, in that specific social setting.

This interest developed out of Garfinkel's critique of Talcott Parsons' effort to derive a general idea of society. This critique originated in his reading of Alfred Schutz, though Garfinkel ultimately revised numerous of Schutz's ideas. Garfinkel also drew on his study of the principles and practices of financial accounting; the classic sociological image and methods of Durkheim and Weber; and the traditional sociological concern with the Hobbesian "problem of order".

For the ethnomethodologist, participants produce the order of social managers through their divided up up sense devloping practices. Thus, there is an necessary natural reflexivity between the activity of making sense of a social setting and the ongoing production of that setting; the two are in effect identical. Furthermore, these practices or methods are witnessably enacted, making them available for study. This opens up a broad and multi-faceted area of inquiry. John Heritage writes: "In its open-ended mention to [the study of] any nature of sense-making procedure, the term represents a signpost to a domain of uncharted dimensions rather than a staking out of a clearly delineated territory."