The Situated and Methodic Production of Accountable Action

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reflects on the legacy of Harold Garfinkel and the relations between ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, by focusing on a common concern for both programs: the study of action as methodic, which means accountable, recognizable, and reproducible. Both approaches seek to describe the members’ production, recognition, and reproduction of actions understood as locally situated social achievements. The chapter discusses two key dimensions of methodically produced actions—their situatedness and orderliness—and attempts to show the importance of considering both of them together. This discussion is developed in relation to a more recent trend in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, based on the use of video materials documenting naturally occurring social interactions, permitting a fine-grained scrutiny of the multimodal details of action. The paper makes explicit the EMCA conception of methodic orders, and offers an empirical analysis starting with the detailed description of a piece of data, before discussing the possibility of finding other instances of the phenomenon—and thus the possibility of building a collection that would show the orderliness, methodicity, and reproducibility of the features identified in the first instance.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.