This book revisits the arguments by which Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel opposed the widespread attempt in the social sciences to construct disciplinary theories and methods in place of common-sense knowledge of human action, and proposed instead an alternative that would investigate the organised methods of natural language use and common-sense reasoning that constitute social orders – arguments that led to the establishment and proliferation of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. As the very "constructive analysis" that they opposed has begun to be incorporated into influential lines of research in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the authors return to the founding insights of the field and reiterate the importance of Garfinkel and Sacks’ original and controversial proposals for an "alternate" sociology of practical action and practical reasoning. Showing how constructive analysis has become entrenched in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and arguing for a need to "re-boot" these approaches, this volume constitutes a call for a renewal of the radical alternative proposed by Garfinkel and Sacks.

This volume discusses current and emerging trends in Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA). Focusing on step-by-step procedures of talk and interaction in real time, EMCA explores how people – through locally-produced, public, and common-sensical practices – accomplish activities together and thereby make sense and create social order as part of their everyday lives. The volume is divided into four parts, and it provides a timely methodological contribution by exploring new questions, settings, and recording technologies in EMCA for the study of social interaction. It addresses the methodical diversity in EMCA, including current practices as well as those testing its boundaries, and paves the way for the development of future interaction research. At the same time, the book offers readers a glimpse into the ways in which human and non-human participants operate with each other and make sense of the world around them. The authors represent diverse fields of research, such as language studies, sociology, social psychology, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. Ultimately, the book is a conversation opener that invites critical and constructive dialogue on how EMCA’s methodology and toolbox could be developed for the purpose of acquiring richer perspectives on endogenous social action. This is key reading for researchers and advanced students on a range of courses on conversation analysis, language in interaction, discourse studies, multimodality, and more.

The relations between Conversation Analysis (CA), sociology, and social theory are complex, often ambiguous, and have sometimes been rather fraught. While there might be some relatively high level of agreement amongst their practitioners on what CA is, what it does, and what it is meant to achieve, that is not so much the case for the more open and broad terrains of sociology and social theory. Moreover, each of the domains in question has changed in orientation, composition, and academic location since CA first came into existence in the late 1960s. While initially a child of sociology, as CA has matured and extended its substantive and methodological reach, it has become a large intellectual domain in its own right, with inputs from, and relevance for, a host of other disciplines, notably linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. It is now no longer at all clear how CA relates to sociology and social theory, what each side currently does, or what it could bring to the other in the future.

The contributors to this volume take up the theme of instructed and instructive actions. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, initiated the study of instructed actions as a way to elucidate the embodied production of social order in real time. Studies of instructions and the actions of following them provide empirical content to the classical theoretical issue of how rules, norms, and other normative guidelines are conveyed, understood, and used for producing social actions and structures. The studies in this volume address novel technologies of instructed action and non-obvious ways in which ordinary actions turn out to be instructive for participants in immediate situations of action and interaction. In some cases, the studies address specialized practical, artistic, and recreational activities, and in others they address commonplace modes of action and interaction. In all cases, they focus on how the manifest organization of specific activities is organized with and without explicitly formulated instructions. This book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in ethnomethodological approaches to research by contributing to understandings of how specific actions are instructed and instructive in the circumstances in which they are produced.

The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel brings together leading scholars and upcoming researchers in contemporary ethnomethodology to bring out the experimental character of Garfinkel’s legacy in the social sciences and beyond. Therefore, the Companion takes its cue from Garfinkel’s noted “breaching experiments,” enabling the reflexive investigation of “trust conditions” in situ, and asks how this research interest has been productively pursued and distinctively rearticulated, both within and beyond Garfinkel’s oeuvre. Whilst Garfinkel’s experimental legacy is often acknowledged, no systematic introduction to its distinctive outlook, tension-riddled diversification, and heuristic interest(s) is available to date. The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel both fills and reflects upon that “gap in the literature,” thereby articulating ethnomethodology’s experimental outlook, if not recasting its current research directions.

"This paper aims at contributing to a reflection about the legacy of Harold Garfinkel and the relations between ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), by focusing on a common concern for both programs: the study of action as methodic (the term is used here in line with the sense of ethnomethodology), i.e. ordered, accountable, recognizable, and reproducible. Both approaches seek to describe the members' (term favored in ethnomethodology) or coparticipants' (term favored in conversation analysis) production, recognition, and reproduction of actions understood as locally situated social achievements. Within this framework, 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 the fine-grained scrutinity of the multimodal details of action. Multimodal analysis generates new insights into both the situated and the ordered dimensions of the organization of social action"--

Demonstrating how the methods and findings of conversation and discourse analysis may inform the development of empirical research questions, this text offers clear comparisons between the two approaches, as well as offering a positioned argument.