Phenomenological analyses of the orderliness of naturally occurring collaboration.
Pioneered by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s and '60s, ethnomethodology is a sociological approach rooted in phenomenology that is concerned with investigating the unspoken rules according to which people understand and create order in unstructured situations. Based on more than thirty years of teaching ethnomethodology, Kenneth Liberman-himself a student of Garfinkel's-provides an up-to-date introduction through a series of classroom-based studies. Each chapter focuses on a routine experience in which people collaborate to make sense of and coordinate an unscripted activity: organizing the coherence of the rules of a game, describing the objective taste of a cup of gourmet coffee, making sense of intercultural conversation, reading a vague map, and finding order amidst chaotic traffic flow. Detailed descriptions of the kinds of ironies that naturally arise in these and other ordinary affairs breathe new life into phenomenological theorizing and sociological understanding.
Kenneth Liberman is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of several books, including Husserl's Criticism of Reason, With Ethnomethodological Specifications and Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Formal Reasoning.
