ethnomethodology: a standalone construct

Harold Garfinkel introduced ethnomethodology in his 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology, defining it as the study of the ordinary, taken-for-granted methods that members of a society use to produce and recognise the meaning and orderliness of their everyday activities. The name joins ethno, a group's own everyday knowledge, with method, the practical procedures people rely on, mostly without noticing, to make their actions accountable and their settings intelligible to one another. Rather than treating shared rules as fixed facts that cause behaviour, it examines how members actively accomplish orderliness moment by moment, for example through Garfinkel's breaching demonstrations, in which deliberately disrupting a tacit expectation exposed the work that ordinarily keeps interaction routine. John Heritage's 1984 synthesis consolidated these ideas and traced their extension into conversation analysis, and Maynard and Clayman's 1991 review mapped the field's branches across theory, cognition, science studies, and institutional settings. What makes ethnomethodology distinctive is its object: not attitudes, norms, or structures treated as external variables, but the observable practical reasoning through which people themselves make ordinary conduct orderly and recognisable.[1][2][3]

Unit

A named research program and analytic object: the members' methods by which everyday social order is produced and made accountable

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified through close study of naturally occurring conduct, notably breaching demonstrations and detailed recordings and transcripts of ordinary interaction analysed for the practical methods members use