Orders of Ordinary Action

Dr Stephen Hester is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wales - Bangor, UK. Dr David Francis is senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

'This book answers the question: what have ethnomethodology's researchers been up to lately? A variety of studies including observations and explorations by leaders in the field - Garfinkel, Sharrock, Button, Lynch, Livingston and Liberman - and rising younger ones, yield impressive new insights into ordinary actions ranging from studies of surgical operations, mammography, and copy machine servicing to reasoning in the natural sciences, medical case conferences and the use of bibliographies. Throughout is a consistent focus on practical actions and practical reasoning in the respecification of ordinary social phenomena, proving that ethnomethodology is alive and well.' George Psathas, Boston University, USA

• Part 1 Ethnomethodology And Ordinary Action; Chapter 1 Analysing Orders of Ordinary Action, Stephen Hester, David Francis; Chapter 2 Four Relations between Literatures of the Social Scientific Movement and their Specific Ethnomethodological Alternates, Harold Garfinkel; Part 2 Studies Of Practical Action In Organizational Settings; Chapter 3 1Thanks to Dave Martin for some thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter., Wes Sharrock, Graham Button; Chapter 4 Operating Together through Videoconference: Members’ Procedures for Accomplishing a Common Space of Action, Lorenza Mondada; Chapter 5 Doctors’ Practical Management of Knowledge in the Daily Case Conference, Nozomi Ikeya, Mitsuhiro Okada; Chapter 6 Auspices of Corpus Status: Bibliography* as a Phenomenon of Respecification, Andrew P. Carlin; Part 3 Studies of Situated Reasoning; Chapter 7 Law Courts as Perspicuous Sites for Ethnomethodological Investigations, Michael Lynch; Chapter 8 1I thank Michelle Arens, Peter Forrest, David Francis, Kiyo Fujimori, Steve Hester, Martin Krieger, and Michael Lynch for their careful readings and commentary on this chapter. As indicated in the text, I am indebted to W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. for permission to use a problem and associated illustration from A.P. French, Newtonian Mechanics., Eric Livingston; Chapter 9 Expert System Technology in Work Practice: A Report on Service Technicians and Machine Diagnosis, Erik Vinkhuyzen, Jack Whalen; Chapter 10 Thinking as a Public Activity: The Local Order of a Tibetan Philosophical Debate, Kenneth Liberman; Chapter 11 Cultures of Reading: On Professional Vision and the Lived Work of Mammography, Roger Slack, Mark Hartswood, Rob Procter, Mark Rouncefield; Chapter 12 The ‘Problem of Dust’: Forensic Investigation as Practical Action, Robin Williams;