Introduction

Garfinkel originally coined the term ‘ethnomethodology’ (EM) in the 1950s to capture his central interest in members' ‘folk’ or everyday taken-for-granted methods (also called practices) or practical reasoning procedures for accomplishing a social order that constitutes sense. Garfinkel (1974, p. 16) later commented that ‘Ethno’ referred ‘somehow or other, to the availability to a member of common-sense knowledge of his society as common-sense knowledge of the whatever’. While Garfinkel's ‘daunting prose’ (Silverman, 2000: 138) may deter us from reading him first-hand, others, for example Heritage (1984), have offered accessible summaries of his work. Garfinkel's ethnomethodological stance was also subsequently taken up in a unique way by Harvey Sacks (1992; see Silverman 1998) and colleagues in the late 1960s, establishing conversation analysis (CA). Under the auspices of the ‘missing what’, both Garfinkel and Sacks argued that social scientists were missing out the observable and reportable ‘work’. In other words, the everyday ordinary activities of members whereby they make accountable and visible those entities we call, for example, ‘welfare agencies’, hospitals, factories, courtrooms, families and various other kinds of organizations/bureaucracies.

In quite diffuse ways, ethnomethodological thinking and ideas have seeped into the management and organization studies field through the work of Weick (1995, p. 11) and Giddens (1984; see Boden 1991).