Introduction

In 1967, the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology by Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) broke new ground in sociology. Garfinkel's Studies not only challenged sociology's paradigmatic foundations and routine working methods, but also produced heuristic anomalies and instigated new ways of probing social order and its recognizable production in situ. Among these new ways of working figured the now widely known, if not regularly practiced “breaching experiments,” experiments for which Garfinkel invited his students to engage in odd conduct in everyday situations (for example, by conducting oneself like a stranger at home). Taken out of context, these experiments sometimes came to be seen as being “odd” themselves, where in the first place they were devised as heuristic enterprises (making investigable the routine production of social order in everyday life) and critical probes (challenging “social theory” for its epistemological, ontological or other abstractions of social reality).

This introduction to The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel concentrates on the experimental outlook of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (EM) (i.e., his “study of people's methods”). First, we shall outline EM's research rationale, as that rationale was articulated in Garfinkel's Studies (1967a), as an empirical and critical endeavor. Not only did his seminal book probe “social order” as a locally investigable phenomenon, instead of reproducing it as theoretical problem ex cathedra, but the book also challenged sociological theorization in so doing—a challenge leveraged by “breaching experiments,” yet sometimes missed in their introductory exposition. Second, we shall tease out the common ground of subsequent developments in EM, as that ground happens to be articulated and rearticulated through changes in successive program and position statements, spanning contrasting strands of conversational, practical, and conceptual analysis. Against this multifaceted backdrop, the most distinctive figure(s) of ethnomethodological experimentation will be located as a topic and resource, sometimes both. Finally, the heuristic tension between analytic detachment and practical involvement—a recurring tension in ethnomethodological research—will allow us to present this Companion and its contributions, in and for the renewal of ethnomethodological inquiry.

Cui bono? The question “to whose benefit” EM was, is or remains to be developed has, since Garfinkel's passing in 2011, been taken up under various guises, both “fundamental” and “applied.” There certainly has been no lack of voices, approaches and suggestions on how to make EM “useful,” “critical” or “reflexive,” including our own—“again,” we might add.