1. Overview
   1. study of methods people use for understanding and producing the social order in which they live
   2. alternative to mainstream sociological approaches to research and theorising
   3. led to the founding of conversation analysis
   4. produce accounts of people's methods for negotiating everyday situations
   5. does not engage in the explanation or evaluation of the particular social order
   6. attempts to create classifications of the social actions of individuals within groups
   7. drawing on the experience of the groups directly, without imposing on the setting the opinions of the researcher with regards to social order
   8. Harold Garfinkel
   9. participants produce the order of social settings through their shared sense making practices
   10. there is an essential natural reflexity between the activity of making sense of a social setting and the ongoing production of that setting
       1. the two are in effect identical
   11. these practices (or methods) are witnessably enacted, making them available for study
   12. broad and multi-faceted area of inquiry
   13. “In its open-ended reference to [the study of] any kind of sense-making procedure, the term represents a signpost to a domain of uncharted dimensions rather than a staking out of a clearly delineated territory.”
2. Theory
   1. influenced by
   2. Ludwig Wittgenstein
      1. Ordinary Language Philosophy
   3. Husserl
      1. Transcendental Phenomenology
   4. Gurwitsch
      1. Gestalt Theory
   5. Alfred Schutz
      1. Phenomenology of the Natural Attitude
   6. Emile Durkheim
      1. Durkheim's aphorism
3. Methods
   1. ethnomethodology is itself not a method
      1. does not have a set of formal research methods or procedures
   2. to discover the things that persons in particular situations do, the methods they use, to create the patterned orderliness of social life
   3. not a methodology, but rather a study of methodology
      1. study of, "member's methods"
   4. no prohibition against using any research procedure whatsoever, if it is adequate to the particular phenomena under study
4. policies, methods and definitions
   1. Fundamental Assumption
      1. "If one assumes, as Garfinkel does, that the meaningful, patterned, and orderly character of everyday life is something that people must work to achieve, then one must also assume that they have some methods for doing so"
      2. members of society must have some shared methods that they use to mutually construct the meaningful orderliness of social situations
   2. Empirical Enterprise
      1. devoted to the discovery of social order and intelligibility [sense making] as witnessable collective achievements
      2. local [social] orders exist
         1. witnessable in the scenes in which they are produced
         2. possibility of [their] intelligibility is based on the actual existence and detailed enactment of these orders
   3. Indifference
      1. policy of deliberate agnosticism
      2. towards the dictates, prejudices, methods and practices of sociological analysis as traditionally conceived
      3. not to be conceived of as indifference to the problem of social order taken as a group [member's] concern
   4. First Time Through
      1. practice of attempting to describe any social activity, regardless of its routine or mundane appearance, as if it were happening for the very first time
      2. expose how the observer of the activity assembles, or constitutes, the activity for the purposes of formulating any particular description
      3. to make available and underline the complexities of sociological analysis and description
      4. indexical and reflexive properties of the actors', or observer's, own descriptions of what is taking place in any given situation
      5. eveal the observer's inescapable reliance on the hermeneutic circle as the defining "methodology" of social understanding for both lay persons and social scientists
   5. Breaching Experiment
      1. method for revealing, or exposing, the common work that is performed by members of particular social groups in maintaining a clearly recognisable and shared social order
      2. pretending to be a stranger or boarder in his own household
      3. demonstrate that gaining insight into the work involved in maintaining any given social order can often best be revealed by breaching that social order and observing the results of that breach
      4. activities related to the reassembly of that social order, and the normalisation of that social setting
   6. Sacks' Gloss
      1. question about an aspect of the social order
      2. researcher should seek out members of society who, in their daily lives, are responsible for the maintenance of that aspect of the social order
   7. Durkheim's Aphorism
      1. our basic principle, that of the objectivity of social facts
      2. we should assume the objectivity of social facts as a principle of study
      3. Garfinkel's alternative reading of Durkheim
         1. we should treat the objectivity of social facts as an achievement of society's members, and make the achievement process itself the focus of study
   8. Accounts
      1. the ways members signify, describe or explain the properties of a specific social situation
      2. verbal and non-verbal objectifications
      3. always both indexical to the situation in which they occur [see below], and, simultaneously reflexive - they serve to constitute that situation
   9. Indexicality
      1. derived from the concept of indexical expressions appearing in ordinary language philosophy
      2. a statement is considered to be indexical insofar as it is dependent for its sense upon the context in which it is embedded
      3. consequence of the degree of contextual dependence
         1. problem of establishing a "working consensus" regarding the description of a phrase, concept or behavior
   10. Misreading [A text]
       1. "alternate reading", of a text or fragment of a text
       2. the original and its misreading do not, "...translate point to
       3. point", but, "...instead, they go together."
       4. No criteria are offered for the translation of an original text and its misreading
          1. "incommensurable."
   11. Reflexivity
       1. describe the acausal and non-mentalistic determination of meaningful action-in-context
       2. reflexivity (social theory)
   12. Documentary Method of Interpretation
       1. method of understanding utilised by everyone engaged in trying to make sense of their social world
       2. search for an identical homologous pattern of meaning underlying a variety of totally different realisations of that meaning
       3. treating an actual appearance as the "document of", "as pointing to", as "standing on behalf of", a presupposed underlying pattern
       4. interpreted on the basis of what is already known about that underlying pattern
       5. phenomenon as a version of the hermeneutic circle
       6. perspective of Gestalt theory [part/whole relationships]
       7. phenomenological theory of perception
   13. Social Orders
       1. the object is social order taken as a group members' concern
       2. accounting of specific social orders
          1. the sensible coherencies of accounts that order a specific social setting for the participants relative to a specific social project to be realised in that setting
       3. through phenomena of order: the actual accounting of the partial [adumbrated] appearances of these sensibly coherent social orders
       4. embodied in specific accounts, and employed in a particular social setting by the members of the particular group of individuals party to that setting
       5. have the same formal properties
          1. constituent features of perceptual noema
             1. A. Gurwitsch
             2. relationships of meaning
             3. Gestalt Contextures
   14. Field of Investigation
       1. the social practices of real people in real settings, and the methods by which these people produce and maintain a shared sense of social order