A special issue: Ethnomethodological studies

A Special Issue: Ethnomethodological Studies This journal will, from time to time, devote a whole issue to the exploration of a specialized field of study within social and philosophical thought. On this (first) occasion, we are presenting six papers from the ethnomethodological school, a developing area in sociology, which takes as its subject matter the properties of practical reasoning and practical action as these are made visible in ordinary social settings. The research literature in this field is now quite extensive, and it has generated both internal theoretical discussion and appraisals from the wider discipline. In this collection, we open with a broad, foundational contribution from Psathas in which he outlines some of the main intellectual antecedents to current work and locates some of the abiding themes and preoccupations of the paradigm. Following this, there is an ethnomethodological treatment of an analytical topic: the Sharrock an d Turner piece on the lay construction of an account of an everyday observation informed by the differential availability of a corpus of knowledge. This lucid study of an instance of practical rationality is followed by a paper by Atkinson in which he takes up some analytical ideas introduced by the late Harvey Sacks on membership categorization and expands upon them to explicate the commonsense practice of lifetime categorization. The third empirical paper, Adato's focuses upon the organization of "topic" in naturally occurring conversation, and argues that a major constraint upon a topic's being treatable as "known in common" is its positioning within a sequence of talk such that it has some orderly relationship to the utterances in its environment. Next, Liberman discusses the social consequences of a m b i g u i t y in intercultural communication between European-Australians and Australian Aboriginals. He elaborates on the devices which Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals employ to cope with and manipulate ambiguity in conversations and examines some of the universal problems in understanding in social interaction. Finally, we present a theoretical discussion by Heap, which addresses itself to the epistemological status of ethnomethodological description in the light of the intellectual commitment of this field to avoid "stipulative theorizing." The ethnomethodological school exhibits some internal heterogeneity, but remains broadly committed to the detailed specification of the ways in which social and communicative order is produced and sustained by acculturated persons in situ: these subtle analyses and arguments highlight the complexity of this achievement. JEFF COULTER Editor, Special issue