Conversation analysts in a range of disciplines have pointed to a relationship between Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. However, full descriptions of key elements of this relationship, and illustrations of how it matters in practical terms, are scarce. We specify ways in which the concerns and sensibility of Ethnomethodology (EM) can translate into the practice of Conversation Analysis (CA). Employing an EM sensibility involves attending to five major features of social interaction: how members of society co-produce social order, achieve social organization in their everyday lives, deploy concrete practices or methods of talk and embodied conduct, use commonsense knowledge, and operate in real-time, actual social interaction with its temporal dimensions. In specifying these features, our aim is to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Our goal is to appreciate how EM’s view of social phenomena—as actual, lived in real time, and member-produced—is fundamental to CA, and how EM’s theoretical insights and studies of commonsense and practice-assembled social events profoundly paved the way for CA. While integrating this EM backdrop, CA advanced the systematic analysis of concerted, real-time conduct-in-interaction. A concluding section of the chapter provides an illustration drawn from an internal medicine clinic, and involves doctor-patient interaction.

All CA research starts from single-case analysis (SCA) so as not to lose participants’ orientations exhibited in the details of individual cases. However, SCA can itself be a publishable outcome of CA research. This chapter, first, illustrates how previous SCA research has extracted candidate interactional practices and procedures, whose elaboration is left to subsequent research, and/or has advanced challenging claims concerning various human and social scientific concepts (such as grammar and action), using the previously explicated practices and procedures as analytic tools. Then, it demonstrates how SCA proceeds, and argues that the strength of SCA lies in its capacity to dig deeply into all the details of each case. Exploring the depth of a single case and examining various cases of a phenomenon are alternative methods for increasing the groundedness of the claims being advanced. Finally, the chapter suggests the possibility of applying SCA to practical issues.

Gender remains absent from the agenda of Market Studies. This chapter asks (1) why gender is absent, (2) why Market Studies should bother with gender, and (3) how Market Studies scholars might go about incorporating questions of gender in their research. The chapter traces the roots of the field’s avoidance of gender issues to the idea that gender is either a problematic or an unnecessary concept. The chapter further suggests that studying the co-performation of markets and gender promises to lead to an improved understanding of both gender and markets. Imagining avenues for future research, the chapter seeks inspiration in ethnomethodological theories of gender and Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as proposes the strategy of seeking constructivist answers to feminist questions.

This chapter outlines an approach to the study of categorisation in language practice grounded in the work of American sociologist Harvey Sacks known as Membership Categorisation Analysis. MCA proposes that categories and their associated ‘normative orders’ are not simply stored in people’s heads; they are used as part of the accomplishment of practical tasks in various social settings. Thus, MCA focuses on how categories are used to do things within talk and text, such as criticising, complaining, praising, encouraging, inviting, commending, blaming, and so on. Moreover, we also propose that power relations can be central to the study of categories. We demonstrate this in a political context through analysis of a political speech made by the previous British Prime Minister, Theresa May. We show that May’s category-based reasoning about social injustice was used to appeal to a sense of social solidarity and moral responsibility of ‘the fortunate’ to help the ‘less fortunate’ in society. We conclude that MCA has value for students and practitioners of language because no other approach comes as close to the study of how categories are used in talk and text in real-life situations.

In this chapter we explore the moral interactional work that preschool teachers and children accomplish in everyday preschool practices. We explore how teachers solicit accounts in assisting the children to remedy a problematic conduct of excluding a child from play. It will be shown how the children justify their actions to avoid being blamed for faulty conduct. In their response the preschool teachers use hypothetical scenarios to avoid blaming and instead modeling the children’s actions and feelings to experience the hurt feeling by a peer. The study shows how an EMCA approach can provide insights into how childhood educators socialize children into accountability and compassion while maintaining a democratic ethos.

Ethnomethodology (EM) has been fundamental to Routine Dynamics theorizing since its inception. However, whereas EM is well known for its detailed studies of face-to-face interactions, its relevance to understanding phenomena such as routines that span multiple spaces and times is less widely recognized. EM studies of routine dynamics take a primary interest in the taken-for-granted yet systematic ways in which members produce actions that are accountably “the same” across sites and occasions. Through sequenced embodied displays of orientation to material elements of the setting and the unfolding interaction, members construct in situ an interaction that is meaningful to them. To the extent that some such elements are available and oriented-to by actors across multiple sites and occasions, a pattern of repetitive action becomes observable. EM thus provides the theoretical underpinning for an understanding of routines as situated actions, and paves the way for a program of routine dynamics research grounded in the empirically observable material and embodied processes of interaction that constitute repetitive action patterns.

Conversation analysis (CA) is an empirical approach to the study of social life that takes interaction in context as its primary focus. For CA, identity is something that people actively use, make reference to, and put to work, in order to bring about a social action or outcome. CA has been used in the study of gender identities, race, family roles, youth subgroups, and chatrooms, in mainstream media interaction, in studies of institutional exchanges such as in education, healthcare, advice and legal settings, and in sales environments, both online and face to face. To see what and how identities are achieved, CA explores sequences of embodied interaction, the primary source of data, carefully recorded and transcribed, so that we can identify patterns, including in how people bring off and attribute certain characteristics to their own and others’ membership of particular identity categories. In this chapter we provide a brief survey of the development of an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach to identity. We offer an example of a conversation-analytic procedure, looking at how kinship carers handle matters of family identity in a support group environment. We demonstrate how kinship carers interactively establish recognizable attributes and features of a common and valid identity in their complaints about the actions and dispositions of absent third parties. We end by considering how an ethnomethodological CA approach contributes to identity research, its limitations and its future directions.

The model of the five senses is persistent through Western culture since Aristotle. This chapter explores the contemporary debates that animate the study of the senses across disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. It also locates the specific approach of sensoriality developed in this book within this interdisciplinary landscape, insisting on the importance of language, the body and action. Grounded on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the book proposes a novel conceptual and analytical approach, focusing on sensing (rather than the senses) in social interaction, and insisting on the way sensing is embedded in situated actions and activities, and more specifically within social interaction. This provides for a conception of sensoriality that is social, praxeological, and intersubjective, based on the way people engage in sensorial practices mobilizing their body and talk, as well as the way these actions acquire their intelligible, accountable and normative character in and through social interaction.

The final chapter discusses the results of the analyses in light of the proposed conceptual and analytical framework for the study of sensoriality in social interaction. The conclusion provides for an integrated view of the sensorial moments analyzed in the previous chapters and highlights their systematicity in terms of methodic accomplishments of the participants within specific and consequential sequential environments. The sensorial qualities sensoriallydiscovered, explored and recognized as well as the sensorial access making them possible, be in terms of sight, touch, smell, or taste, are made relevant within specific courses of action. This reveals the deep praxeological and interactional organization of sensoriality, which concerns both its situated character within the unfolding of the activity and also the minimal details of a body bending over the obejct to smell, of the tongue exploring the mouth, of the quick and repeated palpation movements of the hands. The book reveals both how these sensorial practices are carefully formatted and how these details are made witnessable and observable for others, securing their intersubjectivity. Far from being a private interiorized neurophysiological process, sensoriality is a strongly social, intersubjective, interactional web of practices.

Legal praxeology is the perspective that claims to consider the law through the practices that take the same law as their point of reference. It occupies the space that exists between formalism and sociologism. Legal praxeology is the approach that takes law seriously in all its formal and sociological depth. This means that it considers absurd the pretention of dealing with law while ignoring what its practitioners take as essential to their activities, that is, the rules; but it finds it equally indispensable to deal with these rules and the activities that refer to them through their modes of accomplishment. Legal praxeology does not aspire to theorizing, if the latter is understood as the search for abstract generalization in which to subsume the infinite variety of cases. Particular cases are studied ethnographically in order to elicit the mechanisms that are specific to how they unfold, including what is linked to the law as followed by both its professional and lay practitioners. Legal praxeology’s descriptive attention is concerned with the methods proper to the people concerned. One could speak of an interest in “legal ethnomethods.”

This chapter uncovers the theoretical dimensions of the controversy over knowledge highlighted in Chapter 1. I show how in this controversy, the demarcation between science and law, knowledge and judgment, the is and the ought is at stake. Tracing this distinction through both legal positivist thought and sociological approaches to the law, I emphasize in particular the limitations of such theoretical exercises. In their abstractionism, they fail to offer us the tools for thinking through, and thinking with, the controversy introduced in Chapter 1. The law-science conundrum, I argue, needs a pragmatic respecification. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy, the social study of knowledge practices, and ethnomethodology I seek to ask not, what is the law, but rather: where and how is it done? Neither do I want to know what (social) science, essentially, is. Again, the more productive question to ask is: how and where does it take place? And what are the performative effects of social scientists’ attempts to understand legal practice? Emphasizing actually occurring, unfolding legal practices over abstract “Law”, this chapter offers the conceptual tools necessary to venture into the field.

This chapter highlights judicial file-work backstage. It is particularly interested in the socially distributed and materially mediated character of these practices, and zooms in on the techniques judges have developed to navigate case files accurately and efficiently. It also traces how these work practices were disrupted and rearticulation as a result of the digitization of legal case files. In so doing, this chapter shows how an emphasis on this non-human actor – the legal case file – can rearticulate understandings of judicial decision-making and rule-following that locate it in the “head of the judge”. Tracing how and where judges draw on the legal case file in their sense-making, this chapter instead treats both judicial thinking and seeing as empirically investigable phenomena, and suggests that our conceptions of legal practices can benefit from paying attention to the materiality of legal case files. In so doing, it treats case files not (only) as informational objects, but materially recalcitrant objects that shape and direct judicial attention in specific ways.

The first part of this chapter reviews Goffman’s intellectual context in terms of the dramaturgical model and its significance in Goffman’s work overall. The second part compared dramaturgy to ethnomethodology before turning to the work after Goffman, particularly the signaling theory championed by Diego Gambetta.

Philip Manning received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1989. He is a Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. His work concerns social theory and intellectual history, particularly the history and practice of symbolic interactionism. He recently completed an NSF project that designed a user-friendly way to store passwords in games and is currently exploring ways to increase federal grant success in small universities.

This chapter focuses on the historical development of ethnomethodology, presenting Harold Garfinkel’s career-spanning efforts to develop a theory of the constitutive interactional practices in social systems of interaction. Specifically, it examines five stages in that developmental process: 1939–1942 in North Carolina; 1942–1946 in the Army Air Force; 1946-1952 at Harvard; 1952–1953 at Princeton; and finally his long career at UCLA, extending from 1954 to 2011.

Anne Rawls is Professor of Sociology at Bentley University. Her research interests focus broadly on social theory, with emphases on ethnomethodology, communication studies, democracy, and race relations. In addition to publishing extensively on Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, she has also published on Durkheim and DuBois. She recently coauthored Tacit Racism with Waverly Duck.