This study explores questions posed by students in response to live video broadcasts of dental treatments. The aim of the study is to show and discuss the reflexive relationship between the questions, what they were occasioned by and how they are responded to. Procedures and anatomical features, that for the seminar leader are unproblematically seen in endodontic terms, repeatedly present problems for the students. Visible but unrecognized shifts in the dentist’s work, for instance, provide occasions for questions of the form (...) ‘What is he doing now?’. In the midst of an ongoing procedure, questions tend to be formulated as noticings that elicit instruction either about some detail of the dentist’s actions or about what a generic ‘one should’ or ‘should not do’, what ‘frequently’ happens and so on. It is shown, however, that the movement between specific here-and-now features on the one hand and more general issues on the other characterizes the entire scope of the relevant material, particularly because the seminar leaders’ answers tend to place even minute details within more general endodontic considerations. (shrink)

This study takes an interest in instructions and instructed actions in the context of manual skills. The analysis focuses on a video recorded episode where a teacher demonstrates how to crochet chain stitches, requests a group of students to reproduce her actions, and then repeatedly corrects the attempts of one of the students. The initial request, and the students’ responses to it, could be seen as preliminary to the series of corrective sequences that come next: the request and the following (...) attempts make it possible for the teacher to launch instructional sequences specifically designed and addressed to the students who need further guidance. In the interaction between the teacher and the novice student, the reasoned character of the instructed actions is not explained so much as installed and tuned. The materiality of the project makes it possible for the two parties to methodically and meticulously adjust their actions in accordance with each other, and towards the gradual realization of the aimed-for results. In connection to this, a number of issues pertaining to the reproducibility and recognizability of manual skills are raised: how instructions-in-interaction orient towards the progression of the skill rather than the interaction itself; how attempts by and mistakes of the instructed party provide grounds for further instruction; and, consequently, how instructions in the form of corrections build on the instructor’s continuous assessments of the instructed actions. (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)

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)