First published in 1986, this collection of essays brings together ethnomethodological studies from key academics of the discipline, including the renowned scholar Harold Garfinkel who established and developed the field. In addition to four case studies, the volume begins and ends with two essays which discuss some of the theory employed by ethnomethodologists. The essays in this collection look at a range of areas, from truck wheel accidents and their regulation, to martial arts and alchemy and provide concise and insightful examples of the ways in which ethnomethodology can be applied to a number of settings and subjects. This work will be of interest to those studying ethnomethodology and sociology.
This collection elaborates an innovative analytical framework for knowledge communication, bringing together insights from a range of professional settings to highlight how a cross-disciplinary approach can promote a new view of knowledge that emphasizes constructivist and cognitivist perspectives. The volume seeks to draw connections between different disciplines’ traditionally disparate studies of knowledge communication, defined here as the communication of domain knowledge between experts of the same discipline, experts of different disciplines, or non-experts with an interest in developing expert knowledge. Featuring work from scholars across linguistics, corporate communication, and sociology on diverse professional environments, chapters focus on one of three central aspects in the communication of expert knowledge: the textual carrier of the interaction, the roles and relationships between parties in these interactions, and the contexts in which the texts and communication occur. Taken together, the collection elucidates the value of an approach that supposes that expertise is co-created in interaction under the conditions of human cognitive systems and that knowledge asymmetries can offer both challenges and opportunities to better understand and generate new forms of communication and specialized knowledge. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in language and communication, professional communication, organizational communication, and sociology of knowledge.
The First British Crime Survey: An Ethnography of Criminology within Government explores the early history of the British Crime Survey and how government officials, academics, and criminologists address the challenges brought by large-scale data projects.
"The book contributes to social psychology's Milgram paradigm and the sociology of morality by offering an original theory of the emergence of moral dilemmas in social interaction. Taking Milgram's notorious "obedience" experiments as a case study of morality in interaction, it argues that Milgram's "obedient" and "defiant" behavioural outcomes should be understood in terms of the tension between participants' moral obligations to the confederate Learner and their institutional obligations to the confederate Experimenter. Using the theoretical and methodological approach of ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the book analyses a large number of archived audio-recordings of Milgram's experiments to support this argument. It is organized in three parts: Part I (Chapters 1-2) introduces the project on Milgram and morality, situating it in relevant literatures and advancing an original theoretical framework for understanding the Milgram paradigm and the sociology of morality. Part II (Ch 3-5) focuses on the experiment itself, applying the theoretical framework to analyse morality in interaction. Part III (Ch 6-8) examines recordings of the post-experiment debriefing interviews that Milgram conducted with participants immediately after each session, addressing current debates relevant to the study of morality and Milgram and offering a new explanation - "doing ordinariness" - for obedient and defiant behaviour in Milgram's lab. Overall, in centring the constitutive orders of social interaction that made the experiment possible in the first place, as well as the participants' own reasons, justifications, and accounts for their actions, the book tells a new, empirically-grounded story about Milgram: one about justice - and injustice - in the making"--
First published in 1985, this book gives an intimate account of the cultural-political conflict between Australian Aboriginal people and Anglo-Australians, presenting the Australian social world from the perspective of the Aboriginal person. Adopting a rigorous ethnomethodological analysis and the techniques of ethnolinguistics, Liberman looks at the interactional detail of the everyday life of traditionally oriented Australian Aboriginals. He uses tape transcripts of actual interaction to identify chief characteristics of Aboriginal social life. Liberman goes on to show how differences in systems of interaction have influenced relations between Australian Aboriginals and Anglo-Australians. With its account of the politics of cultural conflict in a multi-cultural environment, this book is an apt extension of ethnomethodological issues to political concerns. It also exposes Aboriginal perceptions of Anglo-Australian/Aboriginal interaction to a degree not previously achieved in any sociological or anthropological study. As such, this book will be a valuable case study to students of social anthropology, race relations, intercultural communication and sociolinguistics.
Originally published in 1986, this work examines how key figures such as Garfinkel, Sacks and Cicourel have revolutionised thinking about how sociology's presuppositions about 'being social' are grounded. Yet until the appearance of this book there were no clear and authoritative introductions to the main thinkers in the field or their work. In assessing the critical reception of Ethnomethodology, Sharrock and Anderson argue persuasively that much is wide of the mark - as they say, the real argument has yet to begin.
