Introduction: A reader's guide to ethnomethodology

Two consecutive issues (Numbers 2 and 3) of Volume 15 of Qualitative Sociology have been devoted to recent work in ethnomethodology. Although ethnomethodological research has been published in past issues of this journal, we thought it would be worthwhile to put together a collection of papers that represents the range of approaches to social interaction and practical action that ethnomethodology presently includes. Ethnomethodology is sometimes assumed to be a narrow approach to "microsociology," but we believe that research in the field can contribute to a broad range of scholarly concerns in the social sciences and humanities. The seven papers in this collection, for instance, cover topics and methodological considerations in such diverse fields as sociolinguistics, educational research, science studies, literary criticism, sociology of deviance, and applied ethics. The research tradition called "ethnomethodology" got started during the 1960s. Harold Garfinkel coined the multisyllabic term to describe "studies of practical activities, of common-sense knowledge, of this and that, and of practical organizational reasoning" (Garfinkel, 1974: 18). Garfinkel's most frequently cited work is the series of "breaching experiments" that he devised for disrupting the taken for granted identities, sensibilities, and interactional routines in familiar settings like family dinners, retail establishments, and job interviews (Garfinkel 1964; 1967). These interventions were not the usual kind of social psychological experiment, as their aim was to act as "aids to a sluggish imagination" by dramatizing the subtlety and specificity of what Garfinkel at the time called the "background expectancies" operating in everyday social scenes. As a renegade student of