back to practical action

Angie sunday
Originally uploaded by angie cat

For sometime now I've been thinking about trying to orient my analysis more evidently towards ethnomethodology. To this end, I've decided to return first to some reading about ethnomethodology itself. I found a book by Eric Livingstone in the library -Making Sense of Ethnomethodology-and this morning I've been reading through it. it's a good practical read. Here are some of the quotes/expressions that I have liked so far.

"The orderliness of practical action is an omnipresent phenomenon. That orderliness resides in and makes up the everyday activities of the everyday society, whether that activity is standing in line, having a conversation, walking down a crowded corridor, proving a mathematical theorem, or producing and maintaining social distance, body orientation, directed attention and volume of speech during a conversation. The orderliness of practical action also makes up the constraining and moral character of the social order. A person feels these constraints and this morality when she attempts to avoid standing in line by butting or by going directly to a service bay. The morality of the queue permeates the queue." (pp. 12-13)

"Ethnomethodologists study the problem of social order as a production problem" (p. 56)

"Ethnomethodologists see practical action and practical reasoning -the work of producing the observed and accountable orderliness of the social world - as social science's fundamental problem." (p. 56)

"For the ethnomethodologist, the production of social order is both unavoidable and a hopelessly situated, local accomplishment." (p. 57)

"The ethnomethodologist wants to study how the society -or social order - is built from within the building of it.She views the larger structures of the social world as being locally produced and as, in fact, always witnessed and observed locally. She wants to investigate how the always, and only, locally available global structures of practical action are produced and exhibited locally, in situ, as global structures" (p. 58)

"In retrospect, we see that we now have two apparently different definitions of ethnomethodology: one, that is the study of practical action and reasoning; the other that is the study of the production of the social order. The first was presented as the phenomenal domain; the second, as the theoretical perspective. The two are interchangeable. We have seen that the social order is already incorporated in practical action and reasoning ('the work which is needed to get the job done') as the unmotivated work of producing the witnessed, practically accountable orderliness of the social world. And we have seen that the problem of specifying the actual orderliness of the social world involves us in the examination of the work of their production - practical action and reasoning. The heart of ethnomethodology is the discovery and research recommendation that the ways in which the orderliness of practical action are produced and managed are identical with the ways those orderlinesses are made accountable - that they are the things that they accountably are. Ethnomethodology's fundamental phenomenon resides in the inseparability of practical action and its witnessed, produced, accountable orderliness." (p. 18)