The work of Alfred Schutz was an important early influence on Harold Garfinkel and therefore on the development of ethnomethodology. In this article, I try to clarify what Garfinkel drew from Schutz, as well as what he did not take from him, specifically as regards the task of social inquiry. This is done by focusing in detail on one of Schutz’s key articles: ‘Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences’. The aim is thereby to illuminate the relationship between Schutz’s (...) views on the character of social science and Garfinkel’s radical proposal for a re-specified focus of investigation. This is further pursued by examining an important debate about the link between Schutz and ethnomethodology. (shrink)

Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. (...) We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods. (shrink)

Quantitative researchers often discuss research ethics as if specific ethical problems can be reduced to abstract normative logics (e.g., virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology). Such approaches overlook how values are embedded in every aspect of quantitative methods, including ‘observations,’ ‘facts,’ and notions of ‘objectivity.’ We describe how quantitative research practices, concepts, discourses, and their objects/subjects of study have always been value-laden, from the invention of statistics and probability in the 1600s to their subsequent adoption as a logic made to appear as (...) if it exists prior to, and separate from, ethics and values. This logic, which was embraced in the Academy of Management from the 1960s, casts management researchers as ethical agents who ought to know about a reality conceptualized as naturally existing in the image of statistics and probability (replete with ‘constructs’), while overlooking that S&P logic and practices, which researchers made for themselves, have an appreciable role in making the world appear this way. We introduce a different way to conceptualize reality and ethics, wherein the process of scientific inquiry itself requires an examination of its own practices and commitments. Instead of resorting to decontextualized notions of ‘rigor’ and its ‘best practices,’ quantitative researchers can adopt more purposeful ways to reason about the ethics and relevance of their methods and their science. We end by considering implications for addressing ‘post truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ problems as collective concerns, wherein it is actually the pluralistic nature of description that makes defending a collectively valuable version of reality so important and urgent. (shrink)

This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

This study investigates rehabilitation team members’ interactive accomplishments of their domains of work and responsibility in rehabilitation team conferences in Japan. A combination of membership categorization analysis and sequential analysis is adopted to systematically illustrate the situated productions of professional sense-making practices. Analysis focuses on the segment in which a physician asks a series of questions regarding a patient’s functional status and disability coded in the functional assessment record (FAR). A close examination of data shows that a physician does not (...) always choose a respondent with his or her gaze when asking a question because s/he is continuously reading the FAR displayed on a computer screen. Despite this, a physician’s mention of a topic generates a professional’s domain of work and responsibility in a local division of labor which is used by members to assume who the relevant categorial respondent is. Further, members demonstrate these assumptions by shifting their gazes toward the computer screen, back to the document on the desk, and turning toward co-participants, thus embodying professional roles and responsibilities in situ. This study utilizes the analyst’s ethnographic understanding of the routines and division of labor at the rehabilitation ward as a resource to explicate professional sense-making practices, thus utilizing Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of work. Together with sequential and categorial resources offered by Sacks, this study elucidates inferences and normative expectations which rehabilitation team members bring together to reproduce the endogenous logic of rehabilitation culture in actual occasions of the institutional life. (shrink)

The ArgumentThere can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social (...) distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work. Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organizedtopical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting. (shrink)

Ethical issues are part of ordinary practices in conducting research involving the collection of interactional data in a variety of disciplines: sociology, linguistics, anthropology, etc. Established codes of practices define acceptable standards of conduct within the profession. Moreover, in many countries, ethics committees, which titles such as the Institutional Review Board (IRB), Research Ethic Board (REB), Research Ethic Committee (REC), have been established, and gaining authorization from such boards has become part of the ordinary activities in carrying out social sciences (...) research.In relation to ethical matters, there is a growing awareness among researchers of the importance of confronting the actual contingencies and the complexities of ethical dilemmas on the ground. Some authors (Fogel 2007; Guillemin and Gillam 2004) find the literature relating to ethics in social sciences research lacking, in particular, in relation to the discussion of ethical problems emerging during. (shrink)

Little sociological attention is directed to dreams and dreaming, and none at all is directed to how people tell one another about dreams. Ordinary settings in which dreams are told mimic the conditions of “breaching” experiments and should produce anomie, but dream telling proceeds without trouble. Foundational orientations of ordinary dream talk assimilate into professional dream studies, where dream narratives are “data” and the analysis of narratives is “dream analysis.” That such practices proceed without trouble poses some interesting problems for (...) sociology in terms of how anyone experiences “constraint” in the telling and hearing of dreams. (shrink)

Ethnomethodology has been torn between scientific and "radical" aspirations insofar as it moves discoursive practices from resources to the topic of the study. Scientific ethnomethodology, such as conversation analysis, studies discoursive praxis as its topic and resource. Standard scientific criteria are accepted to assess the merits of its findings. "Radical" ethnomethodology addresses mundane reasoning exclusively as its topic without recourse to standardized science. I will show that insofar as "radical" ethnomethodology succeeds in bracketing everyday resources, it loses its phenomenon with (...) the very technical skills it uses for this task. This reconsideration enables the development of ethnomethodological social science. Key Words: conversation analysis • discoursive praxis • ethnomethodology • radical ethnomethodology • social studies of science. (shrink)

Sociologists, philosophers and historians of science are gradually recognizing the importance of visual representation. This is part of a more general movement away from a theory-centric view of science and towards an interest in practical aspects of observation and experimentation. Rather than treating science as a matter of demonstrating the logical connection between theoretical and empirical statements, an increasing number of investigations are examining how scientists compose and use diagrams, graphs, photographs, micrographs, maps, charts, and related visual displays. This paper (...) focuses on diagrams in biology, and tries to demonstrate how diagrams are an integral part of the production of scientific knowledge. In order to disclose some of the distinctive practical and analytical uses of diagrams, the paper contrasts the way diagrams and photographs are used in biological texts. Both diagrams and photographs are shown to be “constructions” that separately and together mediate the investigation of scientific phenoman. (shrink)

As part of a series of Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, this paper focusses upon a short stretch of a final concert performance of the Saint-Saens Septet by a set of amateur musicians in which timing errors occur but in response to which various manoeuvres successfully restore synchrony. I set out to demonstrate that these afford a strategic access for ethnomethodologists to sets of musicians' practices whereby musical synchrony is ongoingly accomplished. The central curiosity of this study is the set of (...) distinctive practices whereby a musical text set out in a spatial, linear sequence of markings is realized in a collective performance that unfolds not only in precise time values but also in synchrony.This paper analyzes three errors in a short passage and the ways in which they are corrected either by the errant musician himself or by the other musician in response. In these cases, the restoration of synchrony and the routine performance of the piece thereafter are accomplished successfully in the sense that those listening to the tape of it generally fail to notice any problem! This contrasts to my detection of problems during both my participation in the performance and repeated listening of the resulting audio-tape, I argue that it is this systematic difference in possible hearings that musicians are oriented to when attempting to fake it. Thus, the essential interest is in members' methods for maintaining as well as restoring synchrony. (shrink)

The discovery of social phenomena by a discipline whose roots are abidingly psychological has been a singular development in American educational research. Formulations of situatedness are emblematic of this rethinking, and depending on our understanding of it, we have in situatedness the possibility of a distinctive set of analytic commitments. This paper discusses these possibilities and their development in the educational research literature, in the particulars of the Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) publication Situated Cognition. In the end, situatedness is (...) understood as a unifying formulation. And while it opens a huge domain of topics for inquiry, it also proves, as its inclusiveness, of no use whatsoever as a parsing device. Situated cognition, for example, could not be, nor has ever been, otherwise. (shrink)

Ethnomethodologists (or at least many of them) have been reticent about their theoretical sources and methodological principles. It frequently falls to others to make such matters explicit. In this paper I discuss this silence about theory, but rather than entering the breach by specifying a set of implicit assumptions and principles, I suggest that the reticence is consistent with ethnomethodology's distinctive research 'program'. The main part of the paper describes the pedagogical exercises and forms of apprenticeship through which Garfinkel and (...) Sacks aimed to develop ethnomethodology as a practice. These efforts were not entirely successful, partly because ethnomethodological 'practice' required an engagement with other fully-fledged practices. Aside from the difficulties of mastering such practices, it was unclear what an ethnomethodological study would add to, or take from, them. Whether successful or not, ethnomethodological research points to the specificity of discourse and action in any given practice which a general theory is bound to misconstrue. Current disputes about cultural constructivist versions of natural science illustrate the problems that arise when the terms of a general theory are used to describe and evaluate specific domains of practice. The paper concludes by recommending ethnomethodology as a way to dissolve an unbridgeable gap between cultural theories and socially located practices. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a self-reflective account of the building of Galileo's pendulum in order to discover what were the practical contingencies of building and using the pendulum for demonstrating the law of isochronism. In doing this, the unique Lebenswelt structures of Galilean physics are explicated through the ethnomethodological concepts developed by Harold Garfinkel. The presupposition is that the practical logic of Galilean physics is embedded in the instruments themselves. In building the pendulum and recovering its (...) original use, Galilean physics becomes for ethnomethodologists a first-hand practical discovery. This is not a reconstruction of the mind of the historical Galileo but, rather, an explication of Galileo's practical perspective on the instrument as an intersubjective and interchangeable standpoint available for ethnomethodological analysis. This enables us to study historical facts from the standpoint of the practical logic of the original practice with a pedagogical eye for the instructive reproducibility of science. (shrink)

The goal I pursue is to redefine the study of religious epistemology on the basis of an ethnomethodological extension of Wittgenstein. This approach shows that the nature of religious belief and its relation to facts, proofs, and empirical reality are matters that are dealt with by ordinary members of society. The examination of this lay epistemology reveals that – far from being a settled and established entity – religious belief is a polymorphous phenomenon. Religious belief is a pragmatic resource whose (...) configuration is shaped to allow the accomplishment of interactional moves within specific contexts. I defend this thesis by analyzing accounts pertaining to a contemporary religious apparition claim. (shrink)

In this paper, based on video recordings of Orientation and Mobility (O&M) lessons for visually-disabled students, I will examine how occasioned maps (Psathas, 1979 ; Garfinkel, 2002 ), drawn in the student’s palm are interactionally traced, felt, and noticed in order to represent the shape of a crossing for all practical purposes. Touching will be examined from the perspective of the live production of "trails" on a specific region of the body, the palm of the hand. We will begin to (...) question how such hand-drawing map episodes occur during O&M courses, stressing how the coparticipants establish a participation framework that facilitates the making of the drawing, hand-map drawings are based on lines that are neither evanescent nor permanent. Their “persistence” is not an intrinsic feature but a systematic multimodal accomplishment. We will show how the drawn lines become depictions of the streets and contribute to producing two contrasting geometrical representations of the layout of a junction. (shrink)

In lectures and writings in the decades following the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology [1967], Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, developed what he called a “misreading” of the phenomenological writings of Aron Gurwitsch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Garfinkel’s “misreading” included a selective and creative treatment of themes that Gurwitsch drew from Gestalt psychology, such as figure-ground, Gestalt contexture, and the phenomenal field. Rather than identifying these themes with visual perception demonstrated with picture-puzzles (for example, of animals hidden in foliage) (...) and line drawings of reversible figures, Garfinkel used them to demonstrate praxeological and interactional phenomena: organizations of embodied activity that constitute fields of collective action. Phenomenal fields, for Garfinkel, are formed through embodied work performed in concert with the actions of others. Although Harvey Sacks, the founder of Conversation Analysis, did not explicitly mention Gurwitsch, phenomenology or Gestalt psychology in his writings and transcribed lectures, some of his writings on the sequential organization of conversation seem informed, if only indirectly through his relationship with Garfinkel, by Gurwitsch’s treatment of visual and auditory phenomena. Both Garfinkel and Sacks devised innovative ways to transpose Gestalt phenomena from perceptual psychology to social formations. (shrink)

In this paper we describe expertise as a way of seeing. We use match analysis `punditry’ as a setting to show how professional vision is interactionally achieved in TV sport broadcasts through environmentally coupled gestures enhanced by camera actions and a new technology of vision called telestrator. The paper is based on data from video sequences of football TV broadcasts where the pundit shows to the TV host in the studio and to the non-expert audience at home what happened during (...) a football match. We argue that the transparency of seeing is the product of an artfully instructed process whereby the pundit shows what should be seen, how it should be made accountable, and what the audience should expect in order to fully appreciate what they see. The paper shows how broadcasted match analysis expertise interactionally achieves this through the time-critical linking of talk, gesture, and technological environment. (shrink)

This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with (...) Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order. (shrink)

Radical uncertainty is a concept currently debated, for example, in the economics literature to theorize the impossibility of foreseeing the outcomes of scientific and technological development work. The purpose of this study is to extend the concept to articulate and theorize the minute-to-minute transactions in scientific laboratories. Empirical materials resulting from five years of ethnographic work in one laboratory focusing on fish vision are used to show how scientists produce a material continuity between some natural phenomena and the way they (...) are represented in scientific discourse. Because the outcomes of scientists' actions sometimes turn out to be uncertain, the material actions that produce this continuity themselves retroactively become uncertain. Scientists may at any one point determine that what they had done is not what they thought and said to have done. Actions and the objects they produce therefore stand in a dialectical relationship: they produce, mutually presuppose, and in their respective materiality, stabilize one another. (shrink)

The dichotomy between the conceptual and the empirical is part of common sense, yet its organizing force also extends to intellectual life more generally, including the disciplinary life of science and technology studies. This article problematizes this dichotomy as it operates in contemporary STS discussions, arguing instead that the conceptual and the empirical form unstable hybrids. Beginning with a discussion of the “discontents” with which the dominant theory methods packages in STS are viewed, it is suggested that STS has entered (...) a phase resembling Kuhnian normal science. Based on a discussion of the making of cognitive dissonance theory, it is then argued conceptual–empirical mixtures are unavoidable in actual research practice. This situation can be taken as an encouragement for more sustained exploration of conceptual–empirical relations and their inventive potentials. Invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “continuous variation,” the article concludes that STS as a discipline is well served by promoting an ethos of empirical and conceptual experimentation. (shrink)

This article investigates the work of processors who curate and “clean” the data sets that researchers submit to data archives for archiving and further dissemination. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the data processing unit of a major US social science data archive, I investigate how these data processors work, under which status, and how they contribute to data sharing. This article presents two main results. First, it contributes to the study of invisible technicians in science by showing that the (...) same procedures can make technical work invisible outside and visible inside the archive, to allow peer review and quality control. Second, this article contributes to the social study of scientific data sharing, by showing that the organization of data processing directly stems from the conception that the archive promotes of a valid data set—that is, a data set that must look “pristine” at the end of its processing. After critically interrogating this notion of pristineness, I show how it perpetuates a misleading conception of data as “raw” instead of acknowledging the important contribution of data processors to data sharing and social science. (shrink)

While Garfinkel’s early work, captured in Studies in Ethnomethodology, has received a lot of attention and discussion, this has not been the case for his later work since the 1970s. In this paper, we critically examine the aims of Garfinkel’s later ethnomethodological studies of work programme and evaluate key ideas such as the ‘missing what’ in the sociology of work, ‘the unique adequacy requirements of methods’, and the notion of ‘hybrid studies’. We do so through a detailed engagement with a (...) study that has frequently been singled out as exemplary by Garfinkel for his studies of work programme, namely Livingston’s The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. We show how Livingston uses the proof of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as a way to exhibit the work involved in understanding mathematical proofs. We then discuss how Livingston uses this example to introduce a distinction between the written ‘proof account’ and the associated ‘lived work’ of working through that proof, which we argue allows Livingston to provide a powerful critique of a formalist understanding of the objectivity of mathematics. We then discuss three aspects that we find problematic in Livingston’s and Garfinkel’s claims about Livingston’s study. Firstly, we question whether written proofs are best conceived of as descriptions or accounts. Secondly, we interrogate whether an ethnomethodological study could teach mathematicians how to make discoveries. Thirdly, we throw doubt on Garfinkel’s claim that Livingston’s results are results in mathematics. We conclude this paper with a discussion of how Livingston’s study Gödel’s proof highlights key tensions in Garfinkel’s later work. Firstly, we argue that there exists an ambiguity in Garfinkel’s treatment of texts as ‘incompetent’. Secondly, we show that Garfinkel’s attempt to extend his idea of classical studies from sociology to other professions and disciplines is problematic. Finally, we question Garfinkel’s proposals to reorient ethnomethodological studies away from sociological audiences and ask whether ethnomethodological studies promise the delivery of a ‘large prize’ or, rather, provide something like ‘helpful therapy’. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss the relationship between Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology and subsequent developments in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. I argue that a point of continuity in ethnomethodology and CA, which marks both as radically different from long-standing traditions in Western philosophy and social science, is the claim that social order is evidently produced in ongoing activities, and that no specialized theory or methodology is necessary for making such order observable and accountable. In the half-century following the publication of (...) Studies, Garfinkel explicitly aimed to radicalize ethnomethodology’s stance toward what he called “formal” or “classical” treatments of social order, while much of CA pursued the path of an empirical social science that became increasingly integrated with other branches of social science. Nevertheless, I argue, Garfinkel’s radical initiatives are not completely out of play in ethnomethodological conversational analysis, and the potential remains for further elucidating, exemplifying, and developing them. (shrink)

This paper examines whether social workers and other direct service practitioners can find utility in ethnomethodology despite or even because of the policy of “indifference”. Garfinkel, the father of ethnomethodology, sets out “ethnomethodological indifference” to insist that EM studies do not supplement, formulate remedies, develop humanistic arguments, or encourage discussions of theory. While at first blush such limits on EM might appear to be a barrier for most social workers this paper argues against first impressions. It is argued that EM (...) provides an important redirection for social work practice and research. Additionally, it is proposed that by approaching EM through Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography social workers can bridge Garfinkel’s quest for haeccities with extended social relations and actual courses of actions to find congruence between EM and accomplished professional practice. (shrink)

In 1967 Garfinkel and Bittner were investigating good organizational reasons for bad clinic records, demonstrating how the reading of such records as sociological data should be reported to the understanding of their production’s practical contingencies and to the situated circumstances of their use. This seminal paper opened new avenues of research related to the study of records in various professional contexts and of their transformation, to the development of praxiological approaches to practical and professional texts, or to the study of (...) historical documents and archives. To contribute to this ethnomethodological strand of research, I propose a case-study of artworks’ records management at the museum, investigated as a perspicuous site to reflect upon how artworks are experienced, apprehended and defined in the institutional ordinary business. Drawing on observations and materials collected at the French National Museum of Modern Art, I study records’ careers and describe their material and organizational properties, by giving a close look at some elements. More particularly, I focus on one distinctive property of some records: their thickness, investigated as a scheme of interpretation of the situated features of documentation work. By reading artworks’ records as local collective practices of assemblage, disruption and reconfiguration of pieces of documentation, I demonstrate that what is documented in this process is not only the artwork: it is also the collective work of working with artworks, dealt with as ongoing achievements of institutional practices. (shrink)

Th is paper considers the relation between Harold Garfinkel and Alfred Schutz. Reference will be made to their correspondence as well as to some of Garfinkel’s writing. Garfinkel, who was a graduate student at Harvard at the time, first met Schutz at the recommendation of Aron Gurwitsch. Their meeting led to further exchanges including papers that Garfinkel sent to Schutz. When his book, titled Studies in Ethnomethodology, appeared in 1967 he specifically cited Schutz as one to whom he was “heavily (...) … indebted” in his work. In later writings he no longer made such citations and moved away from his earlier position. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is twofold. First, I show how the notion of phenomenal field can be used to examine, describe and understand particular collective patterns pertaining to the everyday domain of our common social experience. Secondly, I outline the role of the notion of "phenomenal field" in ethnomethodology. I briefly discuss Gurwitsch's notion of functional meaning. After presenting the argument, I show "the locally achieved ordinariness of a common task", that is the lining up of the player of (...) the two teams in the pitch, as an embodied coherence offigural contexture in its empirical perceptual details, as Garfinkel says. (shrink)

In this paper, I deal with video data not as a transparent window on social interaction but as a situated product of video practices. This perspective invites an analysis of the practices of video-making, considering them as having a configuring impact on both on the way in which social interaction is documented and the way in which it is locally interpreted by video-makers. These situated interpretations and online analyses reflexively shape not only the record they produce but also the interactional (...) order itself as it is documented. Dealing with practices of video-making not as a resource but as a topic, I explore a particular editing practice, the use of the split-screen technique, consisting in combining various camera views within the same image. This technique is now widely used in cinema, professional settings, TV, and social research. I focus on its uses in TV talk shows and debates: through a systematic sequential analysis of the positions where split screen is introduced, I show that directors do orient to the sequential features of interaction in using this technique and that, conversely, their uses of split screen reveal their local understanding—and configuring—of what the interactional dimension of debates and interviews consist of, for all practical purposes. (shrink)

The goal I pursue is to redefine the study of religious epistemology on the basis of an ethnomethodological extension of Wittgenstein. This approach shows that the nature of religious belief and its relation to facts, proofs, and empirical reality are matters that are dealt with by ordinary members of society. The examination of this lay epistemology reveals that -- far from being a settled and established entity -- religious belief is a polymorphous phenomenon. Religious belief is a pragmatic resource whose (...) configuration is shaped to allow the accomplishment of interactional moves within specific contexts. I defend this thesis by analyzing accounts pertaining to a contemporary religious apparition claim. (shrink)

This study identifies some of the ethical issues that arise in the everyday practice of researching in collecting interactional data. A form of conceptualizing ethics in research is proposed as awareness of the social dimension of research practices and their transformative nature. The collection of ethnographic data—including interviewing, observing, audiovisual recording, and other methods—is achieved by means of social interactions that necessarily imply issues of face, relevance, appropriateness, politeness, and identity, to name a few. Research activities have an impact on (...) both the setting and the participants in the study, in fact, they become part of the setting studied. At times, participants may be using the research activity for their own ends. It is important for researchers to be aware of and responsible for the impact they have on the setting under study. Some ethical problems encountered conducting actual research activities are discussed as an illustration: issues related to negotiation of consent in semipublic settings and to the protection of informants’ anonymity. The actual resolution of these problems is presented as research findings from the everyday practice of doing research. Systematic reflection on the social and interactional dimension of how ethical decisions are taken during actual research activities could make legislation on the protection of research participants and ethical guidelines more realistic and useful. (shrink)

The paper presents a comparative analysis between hermeneutics and ethnomethodology of science. A careful examination of the approaches suggested by the two programs not only demonstrates that a non-essentialist inquiry of scientific practices is possible, it also reveals how the significant methodological differences between these (post-phenomenological) programs inform divergent pictures of science’s practical rationality. The role these programs play in the debates on science’s cognitive autonomy is illuminated by spelling out the idea of the internal criticism of scientific research they (...) advance. In contrast to the external criticism of social epistemologists, the internal one does not aim at a deconstruction of science’s cognitive autonomy. Its task is to promote the epistemic emancipation of scientific communities by stressing the reflexive dimension of scientific research. (shrink)

In the sociology of knowledge, the relationship between society and knowledge —or rather what separates them — remains an unsolved problem. A critical analysis of various solutions that we must look for to this problem suggests the plausibility of a passage between social groups, styles of argumentation and objects of knowledge. An empirical model of “decision displacements” is proposed on the basis of a corpus of texts and of observations derived from concrete analysis of a laboratory situation.

Both the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science are centrally concerned with the succession of scientific beliefs. In case studies of scientific debates, however, the emphasis tends to be placed on the outcome of disputes. This paper proposes that attention should instead be focused on the process of debate: that is, on scientific argumentation. It is shown how such a focus circumvents many traditional epistemological problems concerning the truth-status of scientific knowledge. By reference to the consensus conception of (...) truth, it is claimed that scientific arguments can be studied naturalistically whilst still honouring the orientation towards truth exhibited by scientists. Finally, the paper offers a brief résumé of recent studies indicating how this naturalistic study of scientific argumentation can be developed through the sociology of language. (shrink)

Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is (...) that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal. (shrink)

Ethnomethodology is in trouble, its conceptual apparatus prone to indifference or misunderstanding both from "conventional" sociologists and from its own practitioners. This article describes some of these loci of confusion and suggests that they have a common root in the relationship between ethnomethodology and conventional sociology. Ethnomethodologists' desire to find a principled theoretical framework for dealing with this relationship is shown to be the common basis for subsequent confusion, and some of the corollaries of their putative solution(s) are elaborated with (...) regard to their philosophical and programmatic implications. Key Words: ethnomethodology • social constructionism • situated action • social structures. (shrink)