Studies in Ethnomethodology

Rating:
Summary: There's nothing like this today.
Review: I came across this little gem several years ago, among bibliographies I looked at while trying to get a handle on some emotional travails. Some of the chapters here were published separately as papers in journals. The tenor of the book can be summed up in one of the chapter titles: Good Reasons for Bad Records. Now, that'll never be a feature on 60 Minutes.

Harold Garfinkel was among a number of professionals in the 1950s that were examining the dynamics of human interaction, including the human interaction involved in examining those dynamics. How do professionals alter the dynamic they're attempting to examine? This is not a question that's asked by medical or social researchers these days.

American dry, lifeless scholarship is content to impose a tired theory on activity & show how folks just aren't following the party line. Then they're called marginalized or a lot worse. Garfinkel, Laing, Goffman, even Sartre wondered: why this person with this theory on these folks at this time?

"Ethnomethodology" is the methods of just plain folks. Rather than squeezing the work of groups into a theory, Garfinkel created a theory for the work of groups. The approach & the language are highly original.

[Note: this is the review that stated Mr. Garfinkel was dead. Sorry. This was based on a misunderstanding of something I'd read.]

Rating:
Summary: quick note
Review: Less wowed by this work than everyone else...

just a quick note that garfinkel is not quite dead. Not
teaching anymore, but still alive.

Rating:
Summary: No joke
Review: This is Garfinkel's only book (setting aside a compilation he published of some of his students' work). The book and the ethnomethodological take on social life can be hard to grasp, especially for those trained in mainline sociology. A word of advice: If you are accustomed to skipping prefaces, don't skip Garfinkel's. In wild prose that pays dividends when read aloud, the preface sets up the whole book and ties Garfinkel's project to classical sociology.