Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology

by

Mustafa Emirbayer and Douglas W. Maynard*

Department of Sociology University of Wisconsin at Madison April 14, 2010

* This paper is equally co-authored. The order given is alphabetical only

Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology

Abstract

Three features of pragmatist thought remain empirically underdeveloped or insufficiently explored: its call for a return to experience or recovery of concrete practices; its idea that obstacles in experience give rise to efforts at creative problem-solving; and its understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction, as an order of empirical practices in and through which problem-solving efforts are undertaken and social order ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. Our aim in this article is to show that there exists a long-standing, theoretically informed, and empirically rich research tradition in which these pragmatist themes are further developed, albeit in ways the originators might have foreseen only in dimly programmatic form. This research tradition is ethnomethodology. We present in bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead, Dewey, plus Addams, focusing on the three themes mentioned above. We show how Garfinkels work surpasses even that of the pragmatists in developing the larger implications and promise of those themes. We demonstrate how

ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis, respectively, continue as well to develop the original pragmatist impulse in unsuspected ways. Finally, we step back from this account to ponder the broader significance of the connections we have explored between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.

Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology

In Experience and Nature (1988 [1925], p. 17), John Dewey highlighted three failures of what he called the non-empirical method of philosophy: First, he wrote, there is no verification, no effort even to test and check. What is even worse, secondly, is that the things of ordinary experience do not get enlargement and enrichment of meaning as they do when approached through the medium of scientific principles and reasonings. This lack of function reacts, in the third place, back upon the philosophic subject-matter in itself. Not tested by being employed to see what it leads to in ordinary experience and what new meanings it contributes, this subject-matter becomes arbitrary, aloofwhat is called abstract when that word is used in a bad sense to designate something which exclusively occupies a realm of its own without contact with the things of ordinary experience. Dewey suggested that an empirical method is needed to extend the insights of philosophy into empirical reality and to test them there, thereby preventing philosophy itself from becoming overly theoretical and out of touch with concrete experience. He asserted: The problems to which empirical method gives rise afford, in a word, opportunities for more investigations yielding fruit in new and enriched experiences. But the problems to which non-empirical method gives rise in philosophy are blocks to inquiry, blind alleys; they are puzzles rather than problems. Philosophy requires modern science in order to advance beyond the realm of sheer abstract speculation and argumentation and substantively to add to our understanding and grasp of the experiential world. Dewey and the other classical pragmatistsCharles Sanders Peirce, William James, George Herbert Meadwere all passionate believers in modern science. Their philosophy was centrally

concerned with applying scientific modes of reasoning and inquiry to the problems of human existence. For their own part, however, these pragmatist thinkers largely refrained from engaging in empirical (at least

2 social-scientific) investigation. In essence, they pointed the waybut did not or could not follow it themselves. Much of the promise inherent in classical American pragmatism accordingly went unrealized. To be sure, like-minded figures such as Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles Horton Cooley were pioneers of American social science, and pragmatism did profoundly influence the work of W.I. Thomas and the Chicago School of sociology, not to mention, later, that of Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionists. including Morris Janowitz (1991). Economics felt pragmatisms influence, too, through John R. Commonsand Marxism through the young Sidney Hookwhile C. Wright Mills kept the idea of a pragmatist critical sociology alive in mid-century. Even now, however, two decades into a farreaching pragmatist revival, one is hard pressed to find many empirical research programs, other than symbolic interactionism itself, that pursue an agenda either directly informed by pragmatist thinking or bearing a close family resemblance to it. Research into civil society and the public sphere is influenced (by way of Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas) only in a normative sense by the classical pragmatists. The same is true of feminist and race theory (one thinks here of Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Shannon Sullivan, Cornel West, and Nancy Fraser). And Hans Joass idea of the creativity of action has not inspired extensive empirical investigation, at least not in the form of a systematic research enterprise, despite Joass own persistent efforts in areas of macrosociology such as the study of modern wars and violence and the sociology of religious phenomena.1 Meanwhile, philosophic investigations by Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom have remained firmly planted in the ground of abstract reasoning, at least in the sense of refining pragmatist precepts rather than of extending them empirically.2 In our view, three features in particular of the thought of the classical American pragmatists remain empirically underdeveloped or insufficiently explored: first, its call for a return to experience, a move that entails, among other things, a recovery of concrete practices, an emphasis on what Harold Garfinkel has described as the just-thisness of empirical everyday life as it is lived in situ; second, its idea of obstacles in

3 experience giving rise to efforts at creative problem-solving, that is, to concrete practices aimed at resolving difficulties and accomplishing, in real time, a revised or reconstructed social order; and third, its understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction, as an order of empirical practices in and through which problem-solving efforts are undertaken and social order ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. The classical pragmatists, philosophers engaged in relatively abstract theoretical discourse, were unable to pursue these ideas deeply into the empirical domain, even as they saw the empirical efforts of others as a means more completely to realize their philosophic ambitions (as in the above quotation by Dewey). Among the key figures of the pragmatist revival, few besides Joas have sought to bridge the divide between philosophy and social science, linking pragmatism-inspired action theory to theories of social order and social change. Our aim in this article is to show that there existsbesides symbolic interactionism, which this paper does not set out to explore, even as it duly recognizes its importancea long-standing, theoretically informed, and empirically rich research tradition whose guiding ideas bear a close affinity to classical and contemporary pragmatism. This research tradition is ethnomethodology, defined broadly to include not only the seminal investigations of Garfinkel but also closely related endeavors such as ethnomethodological studies of work and science as well as conversation analysis. In important respects, ethnomethodology goes far toward realizing pragmatisms original promise; it attends, in a phrase, to pragmatisms unfinished business.3 We are not proposing here that ethnomethodology and allied endeavors are based upon or justified by pragmatist thought. Like Bernsteins (2007, p. 12) point regarding contemporary philosophers who, without direct influence from the pragmatist tradition, articulate insights and themes that deeply articulate with and refine that tradition, our claim is that ethnomethodology extends pragmatism in consistent and fruitful ways without any previous overt connection. This linkage between pragmatism and ethnomethodology has gone largely unnoticed, and, indeed, would be disavowed by many, both from

4 within and without the ethnomethodological enterprise. (As we discuss below, Garfinkels

ethnomethodology was actually constructed against, rather than with, classical American pragmatism.) Ever since the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), it has been far more common to relate Garfinkels work to three other major currents in mid-twentieth century thought: Parsonian structuralfunctionalism, against whose theories of action and order Garfinkel is said to have developed his most distinctive themes; Schutzian phenomenology, said to have been the most important source of Garfinkels theoretical insights; and, in certain respects at least, Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy. With the publication of Ethnomethodologys Program: Working Out Durkheims Aphorism (2002), yet another intellectual reference point has been highlighted as well: Durkheims program of inquiry into the concreteness of social facts. This program is said to have served as Garfinkels theoretical obsession for well over half a century. These suggestions regarding Garfinkel help to situate his work within larger traditions of thought and shed light on what makes its research program so creative and powerful. We are not concerned here to dispute them. By redrawing the map, howeveras Donald Levine (1995, p. 293) proposesand pointing out neglected linkages between previously disconnected continents, we can illuminate not only how the three pragmatist insights mentioned above can be empirically investigated, thereby dissolving the aforementioned problem so presciently noted by Dewey, but also how ethnomethodology itself might be differently understood, namely, as an arena in which pragmatist impulses for scientific investigation can move forward, albeit in ways the originators foresaw only in dimly programmatic form. Our new interpretation, accordingly, has the potential not only to change our map of the sociological terrain (Dewey 1988 [1925], p. 125) but also to stimulate new lines of investigation. Toward this end, we proceed in four major steps. In the first, we present in bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead, Dewey, plus Addams, focusing on the three themes we mentioned earlier. In the second, we show how

5 Garfinkels work surpasses even that of the pragmatists in developing the larger implications and promise of those themes. Then, in the third and fourth sections, we demonstrate how ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis, respectively, continue as well to develop the original pragmatist impulse in unsuspected ways. In the conclusion, we step back from this account to ponder the broader significance of the connections we have explored between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.

Part One: Pragmatism

What are the key ideas of pragmatist thought, at least insofar as they bear upon our story regarding Garfinkel and ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis? What important business does this tradition of thought leave unfinished? In what respects did it stall in its development, conceptually as well as empirically, and why? What contributions do prominent figures of the pragmatist revival make to completing the unfinished business of classical American pragmatism, and in what respects do they, too, ultimately come short? To consider pragmatism in such a lightthat is, in terms of the problems it leaves unresolvedis in itself already an endeavor in the pragmatist spirit. For pragmatism is about nothing if not the creative solving of problems in experience through the application of reflective intelligence. Blockages to habitual courses of thought and actionand creative or reconstructive ways of addressing such blockages, typically in the medium of languageare among the core themes of the pragmatist tradition. In this opening section, we discuss these same themes in broad outlines. We do not falsely assume an across-the-board unity to the pragmatist tradition. There are many differences and divergences among the pragmatists. For purposes of the present paper, however, it is less important to probe into those discrepancies than to stress, in general terms, the overarching commonalities. We do not mean, either, to restrict the universe of classical pragmatistsor their more recent followersin invidious

6 fashion to the cast of characters mentioned above. We wish only to invoke the thinkers most necessary for presenting the three sets of ideas we have highlighted, and, in so doing, also to suggest, in preliminary fashion, how pragmatism fell short in developing them. Attending to these tasks sets up our discussionin later sectionsof how the ethnomethodological tradition can be said to carry forward the original mission of pragmatist thought. The Return to Experience The first of the topics of special relevance to us is the pragmatists return to experience. All pragmatism proceeds from the notion that the Western tradition, which includes not only philosophy but also the philosophic assumptions underpinning modern science (both natural and social), erroneously directs us away from lived experience, from concrete practices, toward theoretical abstractions. In two of the founding texts of pragmatism, The Fixation of Belief (1992 [1877]) and How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1992 [1878]), Peirce asserted the primacy of this realm of practice. He argued that Doubt or confusions arising in experience are what occasion thought in the first place and that, in turn, the results of thought must always be subjected to the pragmatic test: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object (Peirce 1992 [1878], p. 132). James reaffirmed this basic thrust of Peirces pragmatic maxim, despite giving it a somewhat individualist slant in some of his writings, including Pragmatism (1981 [1907]). In his view, practiceexperiencesupplies the impetus for all inquiry; it also reveals the meaning of ideas and provides the ultimate test of their truth. The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point of it, is its concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it (James 1981 [1909], pp. 281-82). (In the subsequent section, we show how this quotation aptly serves as an epigraph for Garfinkels ethnomethodology.) In later writings, James supplemented these insights with what he termed a doctrine of radical empiricism, according to which

7 there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed again, pure experience (James 2003 [1912], p. 2). As James conceived of it, pure experience encompasses not only the things themselves but also the relations between things, not only material reality but also consciousness, not only the objects of thought but thought itself. Thus, conceptual dualisms such as those between subject and object, theory and practice, mind and nature, or ideal and material should be avoided as pernicious and misleading. In so inveighing against the tendency to posit false divisions inside a seamless pure experience, James sought to further pragmatisms aim of moving beyond the fruitless abstractions so deeply engrained in the philosophy of his day. Such an endeavor is central to Deweys work as well. In Experience and Nature (1988 [1925], pp. 18-19), he agreed emphatically with James that pure experience is double-barrelled: [I]t recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. Thing and thought . . . refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience. (As we shall see, Garfinkel spoke in similar tones of the tendency among present-day sociologists to focus on concepts at the expense of the situated details of practices.) Dewey was critical of thinkers who remain caught up in such dualisms. What is required for an adequate grasp of experience, he asserted, is a trans-actional approach, one that involves the seeing together, when research requires it, of what before had been seen in separations and held severally apart (Dewey and Bentley 1991 [1949], p. 112).4 (In this specific respect, he diverged not at all from Jamess radical empiricism.) How, then, did Dewey propose to do away with such longstanding divisions? The beginnings of an answer come in one of his earliest major works. In a classic essay of the pragmatist tradition, The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology (1972 [1896], p. 97), Dewey suggested that experience is a comprehensive . . . organic unity, a sensori-motor coordination, consisting at least as much in action as in knowledge, an organic circuit in which the contributions of object and subject, stimulus and response, can be seen not as separate

8 and complete entities in themselves, but as divisions of labor, functioning factors, within the single concrete whole. He added that in most of the practices constituting ordinary lived experience, there is little conscious separation among these elements, as the concrete practices in which we engage flow smoothly in a continuously ordered sequence of acts, all adapted in themselves and in the order of their sequence, to reach a certain objective end (Dewey 1972 [1896], p. 104). Sounding, in fact, one of the most distinctive of pragmatist themes, he stressed the habitual and taken-for-granted nature of our practices, at least those found in unproblematic circumstances lacking in uncertainty (e.g., what sort of a bright light have we here?; how am I to complete the organic circuit?). When practices proceed uninterruptedly and without resistance, their meaningfulness resides deep within them as part of an unbroken coordinated system of activity, and the validity of objects forming part of those systems goes unquestioned as well. It is one thing, of course, to call insistently for a return to experience, as Dewey and his fellow classical pragmatists did. It is another thing entirely to indicate how this might be accomplished. The classical pragmatists failed to demonstrate how one might actually move beyond the artificial issues they decried and to return to the things of experienceincluding the very relations or trans-actions that are also a feature of that experience. They provided lessons in principle but did not indicate a theoretically informed method by which to proceed.5 Much the same can be said of the more recent figures of the pragmatist revival. Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, and Richard Rorty, for example, write extensively of Jamesian radical empiricism and Deweyan trans-actionalism and devote much attention to subverting the false distinctionse.g., facts and values; thought and actionthat continue to hamper philosophic and social inquiry. They engage vigorously as well with a wide range of substantive issues in social thought. However, as professional philosophers, they are unable to do more than point in the right direction by means of reasoned argumentation. To be sure, Cornel West, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Shannon Sullivan, and Nancy Fraser go considerably beyond the aforementioned thinkers in inquiring substantively

9 into the concrete practices that constitute ordinary lived experiencein their case, especially, the experience of race- and gender-based divisions. But even so, they propound no systematic method whereby one might study how social actors actually do race or gender, that is, how they creatively accomplish, perhaps even in the face of challenges, problems, or perplexities, a social order marked by concrete raced or gendered disparities in access to or possession of material or other resources. Problems and Creative Problem-Solving This last point brings us to the threshold of our second major theme: the pragmatists focus on problems and creative problem-solving. Long before Dewey, Peirce (1992 [1877], p. 114) spoke of a calm and satisfactory state he termed Belief, a state that does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises. Belief, he suggested, involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit (1992 [1878], p. 129). Dewey further developed this idea. In Human Nature and Conduct (1988 [1922], p. 15), he argued that humans typically engage in a relatively unreflective form of action. Habits may be profitably compared to physiological functions, like breathing, digesting. The latter are, to be sure, involuntary, while habits are acquired. But important as is this difference for many purposes it should not conceal the fact that habits are like functions in many respects, and especially in requiring the cooperation of organism and environment. There is thus an important relation between habits and common sense: habits are preobjective or prior to the specification of objects of knowledge. This does not mean, however, that humans are mere automatons. Rather, they follow acquired predisposition[s] to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts (Dewey 1988 [1922], p. 32). Habitual practices are, at least potentially, dynamic and adaptive, entailing a tacitindeed, bodilyknowledge that, without resort to conscious planning or a deliberate following of instructions, enables one to react in real time to the changing vicissitudes of social situations. Deweys account of such practices has been described by Joas (1996, p. 148) as a non-teleological interpretation of

10 the intentionality of action. In that account, habitual practices are oriented neither to the attainment of externally determined goals, as in the rationalist means-end model of action, nor to the carrying out of rules of action, as in the normativist model of Parsonian structural-functionalism, but to aspirations located, in Joass (1996), p. 158) words, in our bodies. It is the bodys capabilities, habits, and ways of relating to the environment which form the background to all conscious goal-setting, in other words, to our intentionality. We extend Joass insight and ideas by suggesting how the latter can serve as a stimulus to empirical research. As we show in the next section, pragmatist action theory anticipates something very much like the perspective on real-time human conduct associated with Garfinkels writings. Dewey recognized that an account of action restricted solely to habitual practices can only go so far. Sometimes, he observed, habits come up against situations that present a blockage or a dilemma. In respect to such circumstances, when the way to proceed is unclear, pragmatists came up with some of their most important insights. When Peirce mentioned Belief, for instance, he counterposed it to a condition he termed Doubt, an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of [B]elief. The irritation of Doubt, he asserted, causes a struggle to attain a state of [B]elief. I shall term this struggle inquiry (Peirce 1992 [1877], p. 114). Dewey, too, devoted careful attention to this state of indecision. In The Logic of Judgments of Practice, he pointed out that all practical reasoning begins with a problematic experience, a fork in the road, which it attempts experimentally to resolve. Thinking is what occurs most especially in situations where regular channels of action no longer suffice, where conflicts or ruptures in practice cause perplexity.6 [I]ncompleteness is not psychical, he (1985 [1915], p.15) wrote. Something is there, but what is there does not constitute the entire objective situation. . . . The logical implication is that of a subject-matter as yet unterminated, unfinished, or not wholly given. Something must be donesome practical judgment arrived atthat will render the situation settled and resolved. Actors must systematically examine the facts of their situation, critically observe what is before

11 them, seek to clarify what is causing them perplexity, and attend to it. Such a thought process, Dewey (1988 [1920], p. 161) remarked, is not aimless, random, miscellaneous, but purposeful, specific, and limited by the character of the trouble undergone. By means of it, theory can be brought back into a more meaningful connection with practice, such that the latter no longer proceeds by trial and error or in accordance with custom or authority, but rather, calls for guidance upon a knowledge that has, for its part, foresaken the quest for certainty. Creative problem-solving, wrote Dewey (1988 [1929], pp. 169-70), effects an exchange of reason for intelligence. . . . A man is intelligent not in virtue of having reason which grasps first and indemonstrable truths about fixed principles, . . . but in virtue of his capacity to estimate the possibilities of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate. (Or, as Cooley [1966 [1918], p. 351] expressed it, The test of intelligence is the power to act successfully in new situations.) Intelligence is brought to bear upon even the most mundane of everyday practices. Habits can themselves be made more intelligent. And the social conditions of the production and reproduction of those habits can also be reconstructed. This might entail an extended process of reform, one aided and abetted by a critical pragmatic science. While Dewey provided perhaps the most fully developed account of perplexity leading to intelligent reconstruction, it was Jane Addams who investigated most deeply the phenomenon of perplexity itself, turning it into a topic in its own right. For her, perplexity was not merely intellectual but emotional and existential, not merely a problem out there, objective and actual, but an experience of internal strain, bafflement, and puzzlement. In Democracy and Social Ethics (2002 [1902]), she provided many examples of such perplexity, centering around breakdowns in understanding that emerge when persons involved in one course of life encounter others whose course is very different fromand alien totheir own. For instance, when a charity worker visits her clients, she is bewildered by what she finds in the everyday lives of these tenement dwellers; the charity worker finds herself still more perplexed when she comes to

12 consider such problems as those of early marriage and child labor, for she cannot deal with them according to economic theories, or according to the conventions which have regulated her own life (Addams 2002 [1902], p. 21). Such conditions of perplexity provoke inquiries meant somehow to address them, responses that can be reflexive, mechanical, and dysfunctional, or, alternatively, intelligent and practically effective. The latter category of responses entails putting ones pregiven morality to the pragmatic test and moving forward with new taken-for-granteds, habits, and dispositions; it entails uniting practice with theory and aiming genuinely to remove or resolve the original disturbance and to resume the flow of life. Thus, the charity worker discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which fail to fit the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people (Addams 2002 [1902], p. 33). It should be plain here that what Addams described resonates deeply with the kinds of incongruities that have been fruitful for ethnomethodological inquiry, a matter to be explored at greater length below. For what she deemed specific troubles of moral adjustment are for ethnomethodology particular instances of a more fundamental problem, that of a chasm between abstract rules, standards, and conventions, on the one hand, and situated practices, on the other. This problem is one that neither Addams nor her fellow pragmatists were equipped theoreticallyor methodologicallyto explore. The Importance of Language The final pragmatist theme of special significance to us is the theme of language or linguistically mediated problem-solving. Their engagement with the topic began, like almost everything else in that tradition, with Peirce. Saussure (1959 [1916], p. 71) is well known for having propounded a dualistic understanding of the sign, seeing it as a combination of signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept). Not only did Saussure assign this double entity a bifurcated structure; he also depicted it as static and inert, for signifiers, while arbitrarily related to signifieds, were, in his view, fixed, not free, with respect

13 to the linguistic community that uses [them]. Peirce, by contrast, took as his unit of analysis not dyadic structures but a triadic process of sign, object, and interpretant. A sign, he (1932 [c. 1897], p. 228) wrote, is something which stands to somebody for something. . . . It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign, in an unending chain or succession of interpretations. With this focus on addressivity, Peirce made the theme of fundamental sociality one of the key ideas of the pragmatist tradition. He also stimulated, with his emphasis on semiosis as an ongoing, open-ended dynamic in which meaning is infinitely deferred (Searle 2005 [1994], p. 725), important later work on indexical expressions, from Bar-Hillel (1954) to Garfinkel himself (1967; Garfinkel and Sacks 1970); these expressions depend, for their very sense, on a grasp of their pragmatic context, including knowledge of the persons saying them, their time and place of expression, and so forth. Since Peirce restricted himself to logical or philosophical analyses, however, no tools were developed for empirical inquiry into many key issues pertaining to such expressions. Finally, Peirces semiotic, with its stress on both addressivity and indexical relations, led in the direction of a theory of linguistic-semiotic community, a community of interpreters or inquirers (Peirce 1992 [1868], pp. 52, 54-55). In such a community, dialogue can proceed in respect to the interpretation and adjudication of competing truthclaims, and a settlement of opinion can ultimately be brought about as the result of investigation carried sufficiently far (1992 [1878], p.139; see also 1992 [1868]). This communitarian dimension to Peirces thought also remained primarily logical-philosophical in character. Importantly, however, it prefigured and pointed the way to the more socially grounded arguments of the later pragmatists and pragmatism-inspired thinkers, including Apel and Habermas, whose views of discourse ethics are influenced by Peirce. That communitarian dimension also anticipated ethnomethodologys thrust into the empirical sphere of actual social relations. Dewey, too, developed prominently the idea of language as crucial to collective efforts to resolve

14 perplexities and to arrive at more warranted and practically effective opinions. To begin with, language made possible, in his (1988 [1925], p. 132) view, that preliminary discourse termed thinking which allows actors to reconsider, revise, and reconstruct problematic contexts. Events when once they are named lead an independent and double life. In addition to their original existence, they are subject to ideal experimentation; their meanings may be infinitely combined and re-arranged in imagination, and the outcome of this inner experimentationwhich is thoughtmay issue forth in interaction with crude or raw events. Indeed, this internal discourse makes events infinitely more amenable to management. But, as Dewey further pointed out, linguistically mediated problem-solving is at the core not only of thinking but indeed of all association. It is much more than a vehicle for storing and communicating knowledge; it is an ensemble of means for the coordination of activity oriented toward the reconstruction of incomplete or indeterminate situations. Dewey made this clear, for example, when he (1988 [1922], p. 57) observed that language first comes into the world as a form of interaction involved in making demands for food or social contact, operat[ing] not to perpetuate the forces which produced it but to modify and redirect them. And elsewhere (1988 [1925] p. 139), too, he declared: Language, signs and significance, come into existence not by intent and mind but . . . in gestures and sound. The story of language is the story of the use made of these occurrences; a use that is eventual as well as eventful. These assertions about language make perfectly clear why he accorded it such significance in his writings on collective problem-resolution, including his important work, The Public and its Problems (1988 [1927]). Notice, however, Deweys use of the word eventual in the above quotation. It suggests that the meaning of utterances or language in use develops in real time and is emergent. This seems to mean, by implication, that we need to understand language as it exists in the concrete dynamic interactions of people actually speaking with one another. Unfortunately, while Dewey highlighted the importance of concrete behavior and its temporal dimension, one finds only illustrative examples in his writingscertainly no systematic investigations of actual

15 linguistic or conversational practices. In other words, Dewey wished to elucidate how cooperative inquiry and associative behavior are possible. However, after engagingly thematizing the important social characteristics of language, he curiously abandoned the pursuit, even though it would have greatly furthered his understanding of the activities with which he was so concerned (cf. Colapietro 2009, p. 3). Language, finally, was central to Meads understanding of the capacity of humansthrough mind, thought, and what he termed reflective intelligenceto control their responses and to adjust and redirect their experience. Indeed, mind itself, as he pointed out in Mind, Self, and Society (1934), has to do in its fundamental nature with language. In a familiar passage of that work, Mead (1934, p. 76) addressed the question as to how a sequence of acts can become a human and meaningful experience. His answer drew from Peirces earlier triadic theory of semiosis, conceptualizing meaning as a relation among three phases of the social act: a gesture of one organism, the adjustive response of another organism, then the completion of a given act. This threefold relationship constitutes the matrix, Mead (1934, p. 77) wrote, within which meaning arises, adding that in this threefold relationship, any gesture or linguistic sign has an action component to it, insofar as its design indicates a response and a resultant collaborative social act: The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning which it has (Mead 1934, pp. 77-78). Meads insights were of great methodological import and, as we shall see, conversation analysis would go on systematically to explore them. For his own part, Mead moved from this account of meaning to a developmental view of language, as encapsulated by his famous metaphors of play, the game, and the generalized other. Along the way, he also developed a theory of intelligent conduct, using the term, much as Dewey did, to highlight delayed responses to signs in outward experience, pauses that make possible the implicit initiation of a number of possible alternative responses . . . [and] the exercise of intelligent or reflective choice in the acceptance of that one . . . which is to be carried into overt effect (Mead 1934, p. 98). Finally, Mead (1934, p. 388) spoke, like James, Peirce and Dewey

16 before him, of concrete interactional processes in which actors take each others interests into account and, in light of those interests, collectively work out courses of action aimed at reconstructing their problematic life-contexts. Despite these emphases on sociality and collaborative problem-solving, howeverand somewhat like James failure to stress sufficiently the inescapable environment of social communication in which human opinions and interests are embedded (Colapietro 2009, p. 3)he continued to struggle against cognitivist tendencies in his thinking. He also remained, like the other pragmatists, content to dwell at the level of abstractionfor instance, pointing toward a concrete investigation of language in use while not following that path himself. In the pages ahead, we shall have occasion to explore these shortcomings. Many pragmatists since the time of the classical generation have made important contributions to our understanding of language and the accomplishment of social order. One is C. Wright Mills, who, in the 1940s, elaborated a theory of vocabularies of motives according to which the motives for human conduct, when articulated to others or to oneself, always and necessarily are expressed in the terms of a common language. Millss theory was a classic bridge to empirical sociology, although its core insights have been more extensively developed, not by Mills himself, but by researchers in the ethnomethodologal tradition, as we shall see. Pragmatist philosophers associated with what has been described as the linguistic turn in the human sciences also made important contributions. One thinks here, for example, of the late Richard Rorty, for whom language was a category of central importance. Even more salient is Robert Brandom, whose Making It Explicit (1994) has been hailed as a work of signal importance to the contemporary philosophy of language. As Bernstein (2007, p. 17) explains it, Ever since Charles Morris introduced his famous distinction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, it has become a virtual dogma among analytic philosophers that there is a clear hierarchal ordering among these three disciplines. . . . [P]ragmatics is dependent on semantics, and semantics is dependent on syntax. Now Brandom radically challenges this dogma and turns things upside down. His basic thesis is that pragmatics has explanatory primacy. . . . This

17 demands developing a comprehensive understanding of social discursive practices. Brandom too, however, remains in the end highly abstract; failing to cross the divide separating theoretical from empirical investigation of language. We shall explore in greater depth below the contributions he makesand how ethnomethodology and, in particular, conversation analysis can complement them.

Part Two: Garfinkel and Classical Ethnomethodology

The conventional story of twentieth-century philosophy has it that pragmatism went into eclipse after World War II with the rise of analytic philosophy and the concomitant professionalization of the discipline. Relatedly, the conventional story of twentieth-century sociology posits that, while pragmatism exerted an early influence through the Chicago School, it too, by mid-century, was left largely behind, with the partial exception of symbolic interactionism. Specifically, Parsonian structural-functionalism and a new causalist approach to quantitative data analysis became hegemonic and relegated pragmatism-inspired work to the status of a minor footnote in the history of sociological theory. In recent decades, these declinist narratives have been vigorously disputed, as contributors to the pragmatist revival have reinterpreted the internal histories of the two disciplines and found a continuing strength and vitality to pragmatist impulses, a continuity and persistence of the pragmatic legacy (Bernstein 1992, p. 817). In the case of philosophy, it is now argued that, rather than viewing the analytic movement as representing a sharp rupture with pragmatism, we should understand that its most enduring significance is contributing to an ongoing pragmatic legacy (Bernstein 1992, p. 823). And in the case of sociology, pragmatism is seen as living on in several distinct currents of theory and research (as mentioned earlier in this article). We now know that the story of pragmatist sociology after the late 1930s is a far richer one than at first realized.7 Not everyone, however, can be said to be carrying the pragmatist torch in self-conscious fashion. Some only do

18 so implicitly. And some pursue pragmatist themes only in the sense of gravitating intuitively toward the same questions and same answers as the original pragmatists. In the case of Garfinkel, in fact, this engagement with themes originally laid out by pragmatism unfolds in the midst of strenuous arguments actually in criticism of the pragmatists themselves. While Garfinkel can be said to have been captivated by the three key themes of pragmatism we have emphasized, he also recognized that pragmatism has some unfinished business to attend to, a promise that will remain unrealized so long as its pronouncements, abstract and philosophical as they generally are, fail to lead us, in good pragmatist fashion, to tangible forms of inquiry. In the first part of the present section, we explore in depth Garfinkels own explicit responses to pragmatism. In the remaining two parts, we turn to his actual agenda for ethnomethodological research, stressing there its recovery of experience, the first of the themes developed above. Discussion of his engagement with our two other themes is reserved for the later major sections of this essay. Garfinkels Early Engagement with Pragmatism The early period of Garfinkels intellectual formation, extending from the mid-1930s through the early 1950s, coincides closely with the passing of the generation of the classical American pragmatists.8 Between his college years at the University of Newark and his graduate studies at North Carolina and Harvard, the halcyon days of pragmatism finally drew to a close and the ideas of Peirce and his successors fell, if not into eclipse, then at least into a lower profile. How familiar was Garfinkel with pragmatism then? It is difficult to imagine a well-read young sociologist, especially one with a taste for philosophy, not feeling deeply the power of pragmatism during those years. But beyond such speculation, there is indirect biographical reason to believe his knowledge was not inconsiderable, thanks in part to his relations with certain mentors, teachers, and fellow students. From early on, for example, Garfinkel came into contact with Philip Selznick, immersed himself in the writings of W.I. Thomas, and was captivated by Florian Znanieckipragmatists all. He learned as well from Kenneth Burke, whose affinities with pragmatism are

19 now being recognized.9 And while at the University of North Carolinas sociology department, he also was exposed to the spirit of melioristic social reform so prevalent in that milieu. Garfinkels earliest writings give added evidence of the influence of pragmatism upon his thinking. They also reveal, however, a simultaneous interest in and growing appreciation of yet another body of work, namely, Continental phenomenology.10 In his very first publication, Color Trouble (1940), an observation-based study that won an award when subsequently published as a short story, Garfinkel examined the dynamics of racial segregation in the Southin particular, the perplexities that arise when a black woman passenger from New York City refuses to move to the back of the bus when the bus driver orders her to do so. What Garfinkel (1941, p. 105) observed of a policeman on the scenethat certain blockages had presented themselves with which he felt insecure in dealingapplies to his other characters as well: they were forced to engage in situated reasoning when ordinary courses of action came to a halt. The story became, in effect, a study of situated problem-solving undertaken by different characters as their taken-for-granted habitual modes of conduct were disrupted. While showing an affinity with pragmatism at least in this respect, Color Trouble may also indicate an emerging phenomenological orientation on Garfinkels part. His preoccupation, like that of the pragmatists, was with disruption, its potential for mutual accommodation and its actual consequences or how the drama is brought to a tragic close and the participants restore an ordinary structure to the situation. But Garfinkel also added a phenomenological dimension, treating the situation as an epoch or moment of suspension when taken-for-granted solidities and the stance of unquestioned belief in them can no longer be held. As this happens, the prejudices of the participants were thrown into relief. Garfinkels embrace of phenomenology also became evident in his Masters thesis, which explored differences in the treatment accorded in North Carolina to blacks and whites involved in homicides. The Negro offender, noted Garfinkel (1949 [1942], p. 380), is an unproblematical figure as far as the white

20 court is concerned[:] . . . You never know why one nigger kills another.11 By contrast, the white offender is a problematical figure . . . in the sense that the court recognizes the legitimacy and necessity for understanding why the white offender really killed his victim. Despite an arguably pragmatist interest in (race-specific) perplexities and judgments, he (1949 [1942], p. 376) explicated courtroom reasoning more directly in phenomenological terms, citing Husserl, Gurwtisch, Schtuz, Cairns, and others, while holding that actors employ a system of procedures of definition and redefinition of social identities and circumstances to arrive at their racialized patterns of sentencing. In a text composed in 1948, just two years after his move to Harvard, Garfinkel (2005) explicitly engaged with, and positioned himself in respect to, the pragmatist tradition, even as he also embraced, all the more clearly, the phenomenological way of thinking.12 This difficult and abstract manuscript, which lays out many of the key ideas of what would later become ethnomethodology, includes several passing mentions of Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey. On one telling occasion, when Garfinkel was discussing Parsonss theory of action, he made a quick but sympathetic reference to James. No more than a dozen social scientists, he (2005 [1948], pp. 139-40) complained, have attempted to push . . . beyond the not nearly so obvious obviousness of the division of objects as concrete and abstract, real and ideal . . . [,] to that rational ground where Jamess promise of a radical empiricism is indeed fulfilled. Immediately thereafter, however, he moved on to discuss ideas by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. In another passage, Garfinkel (2005 [1948], pp. 145-46), referred in passing to Peirceagain, not unfavorablysuggesting that his own views were in accordance with C.S. Peirces formula (i.e., the pragmatic maxim). Specifically, he noted, much as a chairs identity consists in the physical manipulations and actions directed toward it, so too are social identities symbolically constituted in and through the operations by which [they are] manipulated as [objects] (e.g., oppose, attack, defend, insult, validate . . . ). However, here as before, he (2005 [1948], pp. 147-48) moved on quickly to develop arguments of a

21 phenomenological nature.13 Garfinkel explained that observers define social identities by accounting in because of and in order to terms for the sequences of different signs that [these identities seem] capable of generating . . . These termsbecause of and in order tocome directly from the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz (1967 [1945]). Garfinkel wrestled during these years with Parsonss (1937) theory of the structure of social action. He sought to provide for structures of experience of wider range than those found in Parsonss work, to render the theory of action better able to deal with the full panorama of actual and concrete experience (Heritage, 1984, ch. 2). Toward this end, he preferred phenomenology over

pragmatism, since the former provided him with conceptual tools for showing how the world actually looks to actors, for revealing the actors universe as an experienced universe (Garfinkel 2005 [1948], p. 117). It is as if, from Garfinkels own standpoint, pragmatism pointed in the right direction, but only phenomenology could take us there. (We note later how phenomenology, at least in its cognitivist, Schutzian, version, proved in the end not completely adequate for his purposes, either.) Thus it appears that, in this text, Garfinkel moved largely within the intellectual universes of Parsonian theory (which he criticized) and of Continental phenomenology (which he embraced)and that only secondarily and slightly did he orient himself to pragmatist thought. On the few other occasions in which he did make direct reference to pragmatism, he did so in markedly critical tones. Garfinkel contended that pragmatism takes a non-social view of the motives attributed to actors, seeing them as a property of individuals rather than of the situations in which they find themselves. For example, he (2005 [1948], pp. 167-68) suggested that Meads notion of the I has something essentialist about it, as if the I were a kind of concrete biological organism or vessel of motive. Every social relationship will have its peculiar order of motives that the actors assign to each other while engaged in sequences of action (Garfinkel (2005 [1948], p. 169). Relatedly, Garfinkel argued that pragmatism accords a false reality to social roles and to the role-taking process through which actors are said to determine their courses of

22 conduct. Living in the vivid present in its ongoing working acts, he (2005 [1948], p. 116) pointed out, the working self experiences itself as the originator of the ongoing acts, and thus as an undivided total self. . . . [It is only] when the self in a reflective attitude turns back to the working acts performed [that] this unity disappears, giving rise to the mistaken idea of role-taking as a contemplative process apart from and antecedent to the practical realities of working acts. (In a similar vein, he (2005 [1948], p. 192) criticized Dewey for advancing an erroneous view of the self as a mosaic of roles.) Garfinkel concluded that pragmatisms approach to action is itself contemplative and theoretical, granting a false reality to concepts when instead it ought to be investigating real interactions. He seemed, in these instances, not simply to move from positive references to pragmatism to more systematic uses of phenomenology, but specifically to express dissatisfaction with the former as a way of thinking about selves, identity, motivation, and role-taking.14 What are we to make of these critiques, and what might explain them? For one thing, Garfinkels way of addressing pragmatism in this early text was episodic and incomplete. It lacked engagement with many of the latters most recognizable contributions, such as its call for a return to experience, its understanding of habitual action, its concern with perplexity and intelligent problem-solving (in which theory is brought back together with practice), its approach to language and semiosis, and its vision of progressive social reform and reconstruction. To the extent that his (2005 [1948]) monograph can be read at all as a critique of pragmatist thought, the study was unsystematic and avoided a comprehensive understanding of pragmatisms overall intellectual unity and cohesion. But more importantly, there was something untenable about Garfinkels views of certain aspects of pragmatist thought. The latter does not counterpose working acts to a purely contemplative orientation in which actors do not act but merely think. Its point, rather, is that thinking is itself a mode of action, such that to separate the two is a grievous error that prevents one from seeing how creative problem-solving actually is undertaken. For Mead, the working self involved in action is aware of originating that action but is

23 otherwise engaged in it unreflectively. Its reflective attitude only comes about when that action is blocked; only then does the self become an object. Indeed, Mead (1964 [1903]) wrote disparagingly of parallelistic psychology and of its view that psychic components always accompany behavioral action, and he surely agreed that role-taking is not a contemplative process undertaken apart from and somehow antecedent to the practical realities of working acts. Pragmatism, then, does not deem the individual rather than trans-actions the unit of analysis. In fact, this charge better characterizes Blumers symbolic interactionism, a subjectivistic abridgement of pragmatist thought gaining sway during Garfinkels early years (and highly visible in his attention space), than it does pragmatism itself. And the direction in which this line of argument can more fruitfully be developed is a methodological not a theoretical one, focusing research on concrete in situ interactions rather than on internal processes of mind. Garfinkels arguments confused, it might be said, the parents with their offspring. Indeed, it is for this reasonand not only on account of the genuine strengths of Continental phenomenologythat he was possibly too quick to dispense with the home-grown alternative. Finally, there is the consideration that phenomenology itself, at least in the Schutzian variant with which Garfinkel was engaged during these years, resonates with at least certain aspects of classical American pragmatism. To take just one example, Schutz drew explicitly upon James when developing his account, in On Multiple Realities (1967 [1945]), of finite provinces of meaning, while there and in other essays (e.g., Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action [1967 (1953)]; Some Leading Concepts of Phenomenology [1967 (1945)]), he developed connections as well between his phenomenology of the life-world and Meads writings, although he also criticized those writings.15 Of particular importance to Schutz was Meads recognition of the importance of the manipulatory area (Schutz (1967[1945], pp. 223-226) and what Schutz called the world of working within ones reach. This world was structured temporally in other ways that Schutz defined phenomenologically and cognitively

24 and that Garfinkel came to examine empirically and in terms of embodiment. While phenomenology was in many respects different from pragmatism, it should come as no surprise that the early Garfinkel moved toward it even as he continued to hold onto insights bearing a deep affinity with classical pragmatist thought.16 To grasp more fully the principles underlying his fateful move, of course, it would be necessary to study Garfinkels development from a sociology of ideas perspective, mapping the state of the sociological field during his formative years, investigating his locations within and trajectory across that space, and reflecting on the choices then available to him for professional advancement and elaboration of his intellectual perspective. That, however, is a topic for a very different kind of investigation than the one we are essaying here.17 Members Methods and the Recovery of Practice Despite Garfinkels impulse to downplay the overlap of his insights with those of pragmatism, he actually went on in his subsequent writings to take up some of the fundamental concerns of the pragmatist tradition, its unfinished conceptual and empirical business that requires attending to. Foremost among these was the return to experience. Whereas the pragmatists failed to give us purchase on the actual concrete procedures whereby actors accomplish the meaningful, patterned, and orderly character of everyday life, Garfinkel began, after the mid-1950s, to analyze systematically the members methods whereby the orderliness of everyday life is ongoingly achieved.18 The specification of these methods, the systematic charting of lived experience, became the signal contribution of his lifes work. In a number of papers published over the span of more than a decade, many of them collected in Studies in Ethnomethodology, he enunciated this new program of research. In language strikingly reminiscent of Dewey but drawing heavily on Schutz (1971 [1943], Garfinkel (1967, p. 277) insisted that the scientific rationalities are neither properties of nor sanctionable ideals of choices exercised within the affairs governed by the presuppositions of everyday life. Indeed, he continued, the problems encountered by [many

25 conventional] researchers and theorists . . . may be troubles of their own devising. The[se] troubles would be due . . . to the insistence on conceiving actions in accordance with scientific conceits instead of looking to the actual rationalities that persons behaviors in fact exhibit in the course of managing their practical affairs. If Garfinkel here was able simultaneously to draw heavily on Schutz and to sound themes reminiscent of the pragmatists, it is because Schutz himself (1976 [1943], pp. 77, 84), in the very paper cited, drew theoretical ideas from the classical American pragmatists. Garfinkel (1996, 2002) later emphasized his own heterodox way of thinking as a return to Durkheim rather than to pragmatism, as a recovery of the neglected wisdom in Durkheims aphorism regarding the concreteness of social facts.19 Drawing on the phenomenologists, he directed a powerful challenge to the two dominant sociological perspectives of the post-war eraParsonian structural-functionalism and quantitative data analysis claiming that both neglect the specific processes through which social facts are locally and endogenously produced. In various places, however, Garfinkel (e.g., 1988) also effectively sounded pragmatist themes, charging that these postwar sociologies elide practical action by conceptualizing it as unstable and uncertain, as a stream of experience needing always to have order bestowed on it by means of theoretical constructions such as rules or models, instead of its being an order already coeval with the very existence and presence of social action. In his critical assessment, as in pragmatisms critiques of Reason, conceptual sociological thought was seen as standing over and above experience and as claiming a false superiority to it. Garfinkel concurred with the pragmatists on another key point as well: The world of pure experience cannot be understood in terms of the dualist frameworks of modern epistemology, ways of thinking that draw a sharp dividing-line between subject and object. He acknowledged that actors themselves have a dualist or objectivist view of the worldthat is, in their mundane reasoning (to invoke Pollners [1987] phrase), they conceive the world before them as obdurately realbut he added that actors

26 produce this sense of objectivity by means of various procedures or methods and that they do so all the time, with no time out. Actors coordinate themselves, in other words, not by way of a common system of symbols (i.e., by thinking alike), but by actively achieving a sense of knowing things in common and of having the same perspective were they to change positions with one another. From a members point of view, social facts are, indeed, objective, but paradoxically that facticity is the result of actors ongoing concerted work. Objectivity is achieved. Garfinkel thus went to the roots of the objectivity of social facts. He underscored the practical efforts, not only in everyday settings (the special province of Pollners investigations), but also in collective enterprises such as modern science (including ethnomethodology itself as a science), required to maintain the assumption of an external reality with transcendant properties. Objective statements are generated in both everyday and scientific contexts, but they must be seen as nothing other than indexical expressions whose verifiable sense is an achieved feature related to accounting practices in the settings of which they are a part. Garfinkel specified a number of such practices, including ad-hocing, which occurs when instructions are only partial and actors take the left-out steps on their own to fulfill criteria of objectivityI cant categorize this particular paper, but Ill give it a Band glossing, which occurs in the coding of ambiguous events, such as suicides. (Yet another practice involves creating narratives to fit ones [scientific] data, as when one anticipates how a story will be used by various parties: How do I have to write up the account for those who will read it?) In uncovering these and other practices, Garfinkel showed how primordial divisions in pure experience are actually achieved. His program of ethnomethodological inquiry emerged, in this sense, as an important elaboration upon Jamesian (and Deweyan) radical empiricism. Much like Dewey as well, Garfinkel supplemented these insights with a careful inquiry into the ways in which actors continually interpret, contextualize, and find underlying patterns, meanings, and unities in the objective facts before them. His inquiry was fully consistent, moreover, with Gurwitschs

27 (1964, p. 234) appreciation of James (1890[1905], pp. 196ff.) injunction to avoid the psychologists fallacythat is, in discussing a state of mind from the psychologists point of view, to avoid foisting into its own ken matters that are only there for ours. Following gestalt theory and phenomenological psychology, Gurwitsch (1964) explored how actors do not build things up in the natural and social worlds piecemeal but assemble them into gestalt contextures. That is, they experience them as already there and constituted; to take but a simple example (Gurwitsch, 1964, pp. 240-42), when a navigator discovers land, it is first seen as a vague and somewhat indeterminate coastline or island and only secondarily and progressively in terms of its detail. Actors accord to social objects, too, and to complex scenes of

interaction, a gestalt-like character. How does this happen? Garfinkel (1967, ch. 3) spoke here of a documentary method of interpretation, in which an actual appearance [is treated] as the document of, as pointing to, as standing on behalf of a presupposed underlying pattern. Not only is the underlying pattern derived from its individual documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are interpreted on the basis of what is known about the underlying pattern. Each is used to elaborate the other. Garfinkel also recognized, as Wieder (1974, pp. 187-88, 200) has pointed out, that these individual documentary evidences are often indexical expressions (e.g., accounts of actions) that, accordingly, have no self-evident or self-explanatory sense. Instead, the utterances as pieces have a sense as constituent parts of the setting in the manner that a constituent part of a gestalt-contexture has functional significance. Achieving the gestalt requires actors work, of course, and it puts into question any conventional dualism of account and setting, subject and object. One might recall here the Deweyan idea of an organic circuit, in which the stimulus is not outside or external to the response. As Dewey made clear, actors response is into the stimulus, helping to constitute it. In gestalt terminology, the constituted whole provides for ex post facto derivation of stimulus as well as response. What especially prefigures hereand resonates withthe above insights of early ethnomethodology is the implication that the gestalt-

28 like character of objects and interactions is a practical achievement. Indeed, it points even beyond early ethnomethodology (and Schutzian phenomenology) in its view that this achievement has bodily and concerted dimensions and is not merely cognitive.20 In his later writings, Garfinkel moved to embrace that very insight. In Ethnomethodologys Program (2002, chs. 1, 8), he stressed that actors orientation toward objects (e.g., ringing phones), is an embodied orientation, and he coined such terms as oriented objects and coherence of phenomenal fields to highlight, in his editors (Rawls 2002, p. 32) words, the embodied character of . . . practices for producing and recognizing the coherence of perception. One final (and related) feature of Garfinkels return to experience and practical action are his insights into, not the cognitive coherence of the world, but its normative ordering. As a good Kantian, Parsons before him had insisted that there is a lawfulness to the moral life, an order ensured by the following of norms and rules. Garfinkel, by contrastand in this respect he followed Burke (1969 [1945]) and especially Mills (1940)contended that norms are best seen as features of settings and as parts of the very organization of conduct of those settings, not as causes of that organization in the first place. Settings teach what one needs to know, practices get done according to what those settings need done, and this takes place irrespective of what the prevailing norms might be: the ordering capacities embodied in actors practicesand not the rules themselvesare what is most important (Hilbert 1981). Social settings are thus already intelligible and orderly, not chaotic and disorganized, and an autochthonous order is already there, albeit one always and ever in the process of being achieved. From Garfinkels perspective, the problem with norms and rules was that they are decontextualized: in actual social life, even predictable activity requires judgmental work. Those who do not undertake such work and operate without common sensee.g., the actors in Parsonss frameworkare judgmental dopes (Garfinkel 1967, pp. 66-67). Garfinkel (2002, chs. 1, 5-6) did speak of how actors use rules to help others to learn a procedure. These instructed actions, however, have praxeological validity only insofar as they pass what can be

29 construed as a pragmatic testthat is, insofar as they work or make senseand this is so regardless of whether activities have been in accord with the rules along the way. (For example, actors drive on the highway as a profoundly practical matter rather than follow the rules of the road in some mechanical fashion). Garfinkel suggested that actors use norms and rules to realize whatever organizational purposes they can be fitted into. As judgmental workers, they tolerate violations to keep the work flow going; they make exceptions just this time and suspend (rather than break) the rules putatively governing their actions. (Zimmermans [1970] important early inquiries are dedicated to working out this proposition.) Norms and rules are significant, in fact, as a way, or set of ways, of causing activities to be seen as morally, repetitively, and constrainedly organized (Weider 1974, p. 175); they are a constitutive part of the very activities they purportedly regulate. As such, they manifest the property Garfinkel (1967, ch. 1) termed reflexivity. In pragmatist terms, norms and rules are important only insofar as they are invoked or used. Garfinkel went well beyond what the classical American pragmatists were able to achieve in this regard. Conceptually, he generalized from formal institutionsto which Mills (1940), in particular, had confined himselfto all putatively norm-governed settings, and substantively, he set up a highly fruitful and wide-ranging empirical research program. We shall soon see how Sacks and his collaborators (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) followed him down this path in their own work on turn-taking. Two Implications of the Recovery of Practice Throughout all the above discussions, Garfinkel developed two other important themes, one theoretical and the other methodological. In a theoretical vein, he maintained that the proceduresor members methodsthrough which social order is produced are themselves nearly always lost sight of by the actors who engage in them. In this respect, members methods are very much like the tacit, habitual, and taken-for-granted practices highlighted by the pragmatists (especially Peirce, Dewey, and Mead), practices that come under conscious reflective scrutiny only when blocked, thwarted, or rendered

30 ineffectual.21 The reflexivity accruing to objective properties of settings is uninteresting (Garfinkel

1967, p. 7) to the actors themselves; they remove such properties from visibility. Actors consider the everyday world objective or just out there; they do not ask ethnomethodological questions. Indeed, if they did ask such questions about their procedures or otherwise attempted to stabilize them, nothing would get accomplished and the anomic features of settings would be multiplied (Garfinkel 1967, p. 270).22 So too with moral order and the use of norms and rules. Garfinkel reacted here against the

teleological model of action (Joas 1996) shared by structural-functionalism and rational actor theory, as well as by various quantitative approaches, which, for lack of having a theory of action of their own, often formulate their hypotheses in ad hoc fashion. Both structural-functionalism and rational actor theory ascribe to actors modes of relation to the world something of their own mode of relation to the actors: namely, an intellectualist orientation. In a manner foretold by Dewey in The Quest for Certainty, these approaches judge actors rationality by the superior criterion of the theorists own rationality, assigning to actions that lack sufficient facts or scientificity the character of being emotional or value-driven, that is, non-rational. (This is evident enough in the case of rational actor approaches. But it applies as well to Parsonian theory, as Heritage [1984, 1987] has extensively and persuasively argued.) What both approaches disregard is the distinctive logic of practice, to invoke Bourdieus (1990 [1980]) famous phrase, a corporeal and unthinking logic that remains wholly outside the terms of a means-end schema or theoretical reason. While it is true that most sociology depends on various degrees of abstraction or formal analysis (Garfinkel 1996; 2002, chs. 1, 5), as soon as one moves in that direction one leaves behind the world of concrete experience, a world that ethnomethodology, like pragmatism, wishes to recover. Garfinkel took very seriously the workings of practical action. Conceiving of action as comprising an array of members actual methodic procedures, which in Deweyan terminology are trans-actional, he moved even beyond pragmatist thinking, since the latter has rather little to say empirically about the practices

31 whereby social order is actively accomplished. Methodologically, Garfinkel also made a crucial contribution: he developed an actual program for doing ethnomethodology and for empirically identifying the aforementioned procedures for producing social order. His great achievement was to convert the Jamesian metaphysics of radical empiricism into a highly elaborated research agenda, one that maintained, with Heidegger, that the most fruitful approach is not to ask, What is metaphysics?[,] so that we would then begin by talking about metaphysics, [but] instead [to] ask a metaphysical question and thereby land ourselves in the midst of metaphysics (Garfinkel 2002, p. 199).23 How did Garfinkel envision empirically exploring the world of haecceities and of concrete experience? He stressed, above all, that one has to be doing, as a competent participant or member, what other members of a concrete setting are doing. It is only in this way that one can see what the practices are that make up the setting and that are features of it by being observable as features. Generic (or formal) analysise.g., the students were noddingis insufficient. How does one know that they are students? How does one know that they are nodding? Garfinkel admonished: Do not explain what others do as a collectivity; first-person narratives are better. Do not say sometimes or usually. Do not speak in generalities (Garfinkel 2002, p. 203), even when using ethnomethodological terms. Do not say, even in respect to a single actor, He gestures whenever he makes points. Say instead: When he stated such-and-such a thing, he made a gesture that could be interpreted as a point. The gestures meaning is indexical to whatever else is going on in particular in that setting. So if you have a schema in your head of what certain things mean, it will not get you anywhere in terms of understanding how people do what they do. Get down to the rich details and the skill involved in the practices. Go for the lively features. Isolate elements that have some prominence and then describe how they get concretely achieved as intersubjectively real for the participants. Get hold of their specifics, as opposed to their generics. Such were Garfinkels practical admonishments. Much about them, again, is reminiscent of the pragmatists

32 sensibility. But whereas classical American pragmatism maintained, even in its most empirical moments, a certain distance from concrete details, Garfinkel moved beyond any lingering theoreticism. Indeed, he produced a wide variety of recommendations for getting at practices in lived experience that would otherwise be hard to detect or analyze. It is this contribution that constitutes his enduring legacyand the most significant means whereby he can be said to have carried forward the unfulfilled agenda of pragmatist philosophy.

Part Three: Ethnomethodological Studies of Work in the Professions and Science

The above topic of Garfinkels methodological policies leads us directly to the second of the three pragmatist themes we originally identified: problems and creative problem-solving. Following Schutz (1967 [1953]), Garfinkel (1963, p. 188) proposed, in his seminal paper, A Conception of, and Experiments with, Trust as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions, that the perceived normality of events in the everyday world reflects actors investment in certain tacit and unreflective presumptions, that is, in the commonsense knowledge made possible by adherence to the attitude of daily life. When actors do notor cannotinvest in these presumptions, they experience profound difficulties in maintaining the everyday social scene. Garfinkel also owed a debt to Burke on this score, and hence, indirectly, to the pragmatistsa fact that became apparent in a much later work (2002, p. 211), in which he spoke approvingly of Burkes [1969 (1945)] idea of perspective by incongruity. In similar spirit to Burke, he (1963, p. 187) asked in his Trust paper, what can be done to make for trouble[?] Garfinkel devised social-scientific procedures for rendering members work visible: the most famous of these were his breaching experiments, which he originally presented as tutorial exercises or teaching demonstrations for students. These experiments brought about in participants of social scenes a state of profound disorientationor, to use a term from

33 Deweys and Addamss vocabulary, perplexityand yielded the unanticipated additional result (which might have surprised even the pragmatists) that the regular workings of taken-for-granted practices are experienced not only as a cognitive but also as a moral obligation (hence the word trust in the essay title). In Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel introduced yet another approach to the uncovering and specification of ethno-methods. Examining a real-life situation, that of an intersexed person in pursuit of a gender changing operation, he argued that blockages to the ordinary unrecognized operation of everyday practices arise, not from experimental contrivances, but from features already built into (and naturally occurring in) that situation. Thus, Agnes, who seeks to pass as a woman despite male features to her anatomy and biography, is forced to act as a practical ethnomethodologist (Garfinkel 1967, p. 180), thereby experiencing the ordinary taken-for-granted worldspecifically, the dichotomous sex composition of the normative gender orderas already and profoundly breached and thereby providing unique insights into how the visibility of anyones gender status is ongoingly accomplished. The model of inquiry established in this case study became increasingly prevalent, as investigators more and more eschewed inducing breaches in favor of examining obstructions arising spontaneously in social situations. But in either case, the similarities between pragmatism and ethnomethodology were highly evident. We focus on more of these similarities in what follows, contending that pragmatist views on perplexity have a close analogue in what Garfinkeland later ethnomethodologists of work and sciencerefer to as the shop floor problem. The Shop Floor Problem In the pragmatist tradition, as we have seen, perplexities represent a kind of moral fissure that arises when one way of life runs up against another, indexing a breach in social relations. For example, when examining disruptions to common-sense knowledge, Addams directed special attention to sexual, class, ethnic and other categorical differences between people, along with the disparities in power these can

34 involve. She exposed the perplexities that arise, for example, when children (especially daughters, in her account) become educated and depart from obligations of filial piety to embrace wider social ideals; when household members employ domestic helpers; when any actor in an industrial or educational enterprise depreciates the social experience of those who labor to earn wages or become educated; orin the example we discussed earlierwhen a social worker of one class and educational background confronts a family of a lower stratum. Garfinkel went about the problem of investigating perplexities in a significantly different way. He examined instances in which one way of life is articulated in bureaucratic requirements, procedural specifications, or management plans, while another is what actually happens on the shop floor, with all its unanticipated circumstances and contingencies. From an ethnomethodological point of view, any workplace can be filled with the kinds of contingencies, circumstances, particularities, and exigencies that preoccupied Addamss charity workers, difficulties that defy the abstract plans and expectations of theorists, managers, designers, and others concerned to stipulate how shop floor courses of action should flow: the disparity between plans and situated actions, to invoke Suchmans (1987) phrase, is not always class-based, but it can be. What Garfinkel emphasized is that this disparity is better conceived as a function of the shop floor problem than as a discordance between different kinds of social experiences or backgrounds. That is, he stressed that the source of perplexity is best understood as a discrepancy between managerially approved ways of recording and tracking performance and the actual skills in detail and locally organized, lived work of doing a job in real time with the materials and personnel at hand. The pragmatists fell short in probing empirically the situated methods and practices whereby participants actually handle such discrepancies and produce order at the local level. Following Garfinkel, by contrast, ethnomethodologists of work and science have investigated and documented the particular, concrete, collaborative, and real-time ways in which actors manage, in face of manifold contingencies and unanticipated circumstances, to carry out the abstract versions of whatever it is that their occupational

35 responsibilities might require.24 Before we turn to an assessment of these various ethnomethodological investigations, let us briefy review Garfinkels own inquiries into the shop floor problem. He began to elucidate the issue (without specifically labelling it as such) as early as Studies in Ethnomethodology, where he directed close attention to actors concrete worksite-specific practices, whether these be found in jury rooms, outpatient psychiatric clinics, or suicide prevention centers. In a later article, The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar, he turned to the nights work, as he called it, of astronomers engaged in discovering activities. We did not examine, he and his co-authors (Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston 1981, pp. 137, 139-41, italics in original) observed, and we want not to examine the end-point object [i.e., the discovered pulsar] for its correspondence to an original plan. We want to disregard, we want not to take seriously, how closely or how badly the object corresponds to some original designparticularly to some cognitive expectancy or to some theoretical modelthat is independent of their embodied works particular occasions as of which the objects productionthe objectconsists, only and entirely. Garfinkel and his associates devoted themselves instead to specifying these embodied practices first time through, local production properties.25 It was only in Ethnomethodologys Dubbing it

Program that Garfinkel discussed the shop floor problem explicitly and at length.26

Ethnomethodologys discovered topic, he observed there that the practices found in works places, just there, and with just what equipment and instruments are at hand, in just this building, and in just these rooms, with just who is there, in just the time that is marked by clock (Garfinkel 2002, pp. 95, 249), can be the object of tutorial exercises, which attend to the phenomenal field properties of common occurrences (Garfinkel 2002, pp. 95, 249, 100). Or, he added, they can drive hybrid studies, which are concerned with properties of work in densely recurrent structures . . . , not occasionally but systematically, and therein ubiquitously (Garfinkel 2002, p. 100, italics ours). The latter studies require investigators to immerse

36 themselves in the work settings they are studying, to become so competent at the work at hand that their findings will be taken seriously by those occupationally or professionally engaged in it.27 Even with these recent elaborations, however, Garfinkels insights into the shop floor problem evinced a remarkable consistency over the decades. Together, they opened up an ambitious new agenda for substantive research. Garfinkel brought togetherunder one conceptual rubrica wealth of new empirical questions to explore. We now turn to ethnomethodologists systematic pursuit of these questions, to their actual studies of the shop floor in all its concrete details. Perplexities in Social Work and Health Care One can only imagine what a Dewey or (especially) an Addams might have done with the tools of an ethnomethodologist. And one can only imagine what an ethnomethodologist would do with these pragmatists (again, especially Addamss) empirical research topics, studying, for example, the perplexities of charity (and social) workers from within the framework of the shop floor problem. While no ethnomethodological study has yet covered this empirical terrain, there are a few investigations somewhat closely related to those of Addams. Let us briefly consider them, selecting from the wide literature on this topic a small set of studies that engage with our featured themes while also representing especially influential contributions to the ethnomethodological tradition. The first and earliest of these is

Zimmermans aforementioned inquiry into intake processes at a welfare agency. He (1970, pp. 221, 222, 228) found that workers often face perplexing situations when rules about assigning clients come up against unforeseeable circumstances that do not fit with what the rules dictate. There is a discordance, he discerned, between the explicitly stated policies and procedures designed to advance formally defined goals and the variety of practices and mundane considerations involved in determinations of the operational meaning and situational relevance of [these] policies and procedures, a discrepancy, that is, between the formal plan of the organization and its actual task structure . . . , the variety of problematic

37 features generated by the attempt to put [its programmatically specified tasks] into practice. Faced with this discrepancy, workers regularly depart from the rulesthe abstract version of how they are to assign clients. They do so, not out of noncompliance or deviance, but from a concern that everyone involved be accountably satisfied that the processing of cases is happening for all practical purposes. The order of getting work done in an orderly fashion resides, not in the rules per se, but in the methodic ways in which workers use the rules, especially in perplexing contexts, in a concerted effort to achieve agency goals. Zimmerman (1970, p. 225) concluded (in words that could almost be found verbatim in a pragmatist account of intelligence): [T]he operational import of formal rules and organizational policy (of which the assignment procedure is an instance) is decided by personnel on a case-by-case basis and warranted on reasonable grounds. . . . [T]he reasonableness of such decisions, from the point of view of personnel, relies upon a taken-for-granted grasp of, and implicit reference to, the situated practical features of task activity. Closer yet to Addams concerns was research on British Health Visitors and their dealings with families with newborn babies. Health Visitors (HVs) are agents of a community-nursing program in the United Kingdom, authorized to detect and prevent ill health, identify physical needs, and provide advice to families in the care and management of their children. HVs have a statutory obligation to visit all mothers with children under the age of five to ensure that illness is prevented and to find problematic cases for referral to specialized agencies. Having to fill out a form called the Child Health Record and to fulfill the textually stated requirements of the Health Visitors Association presents a kind of shop floor problem, with all the moral dimensions that Addams glossed but was unable to explore in the details of everyday practice. Although HVs attempt to construct a befriending relationship to families, Heritage (2002, p. 316) observes: A substantial proportion of mothers, particularly those in poorer socioeconomic circumstances, see the HV service largely in terms of social control and surveillance and attempt to minimize contact with its

38 representatives. Most surveys suggest declining levels of satisfaction with the role and value of HVs. There appear to be good interactional reasons for such declining levels of satisfaction. For example, there is a moral backdrop to the relationship that is not explicitly formulated. HVs regard mothers as properly motivated to take care of their babies but not necessarily as competent to do so; this orientation on the part of HVs results in their frequently offering unsolicited advice to mothers, who mostly resist the advice and sometimes in a defensive way. The relationship comes to be constructed, not as a befriending one, but rather as one of experts to novices, as the HVs and mothers (sometimes fathers) struggle with one another in beneath-the-surface competence struggles (Heritage and Sefi 1992), wherein mothers strive to show that they have displayed vigilance in child care and have competently responded to problematic situations (Heritage and Lindstrm 1998, p. 416). This research on Health Visitors addresses precisely the kind of perplexity about which Addams wrote, a perplexity based in professional-lay disparities and in the class differences built into them. However, there is much more afoot here than background-variable disparities. The very form that HVs need to fill out, a form with requirements for face sheet data, consent signatures for immunizations, and explanations of clinic procedures, is often an intrusionwith an alien set of relevancies (Heritage 2002, p. 318)into the relationship between HVs and mothers (except when fathers are present); HVs use it to legitimate their questions and to draw fathers into the conversation. Moreover, following a principle drawn from the normative order of everyday life and neither built into the form nor drawn from any procedure for implementing the instrument, HVs ask questions that are optimized (Heritage 2002, p. 322). For instance, the form has a blank space for birth information: pregnancy normal/abnormal, specify. HVs regularly generate this information by asking (optimistically), And you had a normal pregnancy? Exceptions occur when they have learned something through prior discussion that indicates that there was some difficulty. Thus, the form does not operate irrespective of the identities of participants

39 and across all circumstances. Rather, while drawing on generic interactional relevancies, it still responds to particular circumstances, for HVs engage in recipient design (Heritage 2002, p. 326; cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) by asking questions that reflect in situ family biography. Ethnomethodological research demonstrates again and again that bureaucratic forms in any work setting always involve a set of normal, natural troubles (Garfinkel 1967, p. 192) in their use. Accordingly, these forms require and call for common-sense interpretation, as embodied in a set of practices for understanding and interpreting their requirements in relation to situated purposes and circumstances. Entries in bureaucratic records, according to Heath and Luff (2000, p. 38), require defeasing, which, in the philosophy of jurisprudence, refers to how any rule or law, despite its precision and relevance, confronts actual conditions that it cannot handle in formulaic fashion. Somehow, the rule or law (or stipulated categories on a form, in the case of welfare and other such agencies) needs to be explicated with regard to those conditions. Because circumstances and contingencies are boundless, the perplexities of doing shop floor workperplexities that cause actors responses to be, in Deweys terms, incomplete or unfulfilledare also boundless. The great insight and contribution of ethnomethodology has been to make a topic of these perplexities and to demonstrate that social organization inheres in the practices by which actors handle them. One final line of work that bears, at least indirectly, on the sorts of perplexities originally addressed by Addams is ethnomethodological studies of good and bad news, typically conducted in social settings involving health care providers and recipients. Maynard (2003) has investigated how good and bad news represents disruptions of quotidian life to the extent of jeopardizing participants sense of what is real. He observes that participants in the everyday world on rare occasions inhabit a state that phenomenologists thought belonged only to the philosopher, a state of epoche, where the ordinary abandonment of doubt in the objectivity of the external world and in the character of certain social objects therein is suspended. (Peirce, too, as we have seen, spoke of states of Doubt and of Belief.) Unlike the phenomenologist,

40 however, who suspends the natural attitude in a strategic fashion, everyday actors have the epoche thrust upon them often in moments of ordinary talk and social interaction, moments when they become oriented to possible good or bad news and its various adumbrations. In those moments, they experience something very much like the perplexity with which pragmatists were preoccupied. Indeed, as one commentator (Siegfried 2002, pp. xxv-xxvi) has pointed out, Addams herself suggested that this perplexity of experience represents a breakdownan epochof usual understandings, assumptions, and presuppositions, all close cousins of commonsense knowledge and of what Schutz (1967 [1953]) referred to as the attitude of daily life. Recall, from our earlier discussion, that when Dewey (1988 [1938], ch. VI) spoke of perplexity, he conceived of it as an indeterminate situation. In the ethnomethodological treatment of good and bad news, it is possible to see, in fine interactional detail, the epoche and indeterminacy in which participants become embedded. It is also possible to follow in pragmatist terms the creative problemsolving and intelligence with which these participants, when delivering or receiving good or bad news, move, as it were, between social worlds, reconstructing the old in light of new exigencies. They do so through practices that shift the accent of reality from one prior set of social organizational forms to a newer, fresher set. In episodes consisting of only a few turns of talk, that is, speaker and hearer open upand then close back downdeep fissures in their everyday experience, thereby creating (at least ideally) newly habitual, newly intelligent modes of being in the world. Perplexities in the Discovering and Social Sciences Empirical analyses of social welfare and medical settings are by no means the only contributions by ethnomethodologists to the systematic study of the shop floor problem and of perplexity. It will be recalled that Garfinkel himself deemed these phenomena to be prominent features of the discovering sciences. It is these sciences, accordingly, that he made a key object of ethnomethodological

investigation.28 In this respect, he attended to some unfinished business in the agenda of pragmatist

41 philosophers. In Deweys work, if not in Addamss, the discovering sciences were a topic of utmost importance. It is to these sciences, Garfinkel declared, that we must go, not to philosophy, to find out the facts of the world. Dewey seemed to suggest, in fact, that all the positive sciencesmathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, among othersare commensurate with pragmatist investigation, for they help to resolve situations of perplexity by providing knowledge necessary for overcoming conflict in coordination. What he did not investigate, howeverbut ethnomethodology doesis the phenomenon of perplexity as it appears inside science itself. Garfinkels co-authored inquiry into the discovery of the pulsar, together with subsequent work by his collaborators on that studyEric Livingston and Michael Lynchdemonstrates that the discovering sciences are, indeed, often the sites of incongruities between plans and situated actions. These researches have shown how perplexity in terms of the shop floor problem emerges and is dealt with in the everyday, on-the-job, real-time activities of working scientists. Livingston (1986, pp. 7, x), for instance, explores how, in the situated, lived-work of doing professional mathematicsthat is, as a worksite phenomenon, mathematicians confront and solve problems in the production of ordinary, naturally accountable proofs. In most studies, he observes, the living foundations of mathematics . . . remain . . . untouched and unexamined. In his own research, by contrast, he (1986, p. 16) examines the local work of producing and exhibiting, for and among mathematicians, a followableand, therein, a naturally accountableline of mathematical argumentation. In this way, he (1986, pp. 15-16) returns the mathematical object to its origins within the mathematical work-site . . . , the real-world practices of professional mathematicians, thereby highlighting the reasoners work that surrounds even a simple proof and [that] recovers that proof as a naturally accountable mathematical object. Livingstons inquiry is an exemplary hybrid study of practices in the discovering sciences, meant to be instructive in and consequential for practicing mathematicians themselves (Livingston 1986, p. 6). It explores from within, as it were, the problem-solving in which scientists engage on a regular basis, in the course of a days work,

42 taking seriously the situated details of the actual work they do on the mathematical shop floor. Lynch, tooGarfinkels other collaborator on the pulsar articleoffers useful insights into the shop floor problem within the discovering sciences. He examines a neuroscience worksite, one devoted to studying, with an electron microscope, a regenerative brain process called axon sprouting.29 Lynch (1985, p. 3) focuses on the unformulated practices of that laboratory setting, practices outside the purview of official methods sections of published research papers, with their step-by-step maxims of conduct for the already competent practitioner to assimilate. Drawing on ethnographic observations, as well as on conversation analyses of recorded worksite interactionsinteractions involving talk which accompanies the work as that work is underway; not talk about the work but talk in the work, talk which is part of the work (Lynch 1985, p. 10)he devotes close attention to the problem, one often encountered by neuroscientists as part of their days work, of distinguishing facts from artifacts in the electron micrographs generated by their work equipment and procedures. Production of that distinction in specific cases, and then also the resolution of perplexities, are concerted and in situ achievements. Lynchs work also inquires into the problem of reaching agreement in scientific practice. It explores the devices and ethno-methods whereby laboratory scientists, in the course of their shop talk, move toward an achieved agreementin other words, how the talk of members establishes any objectivity for all practical purposes in the local setting (Lynch 1985, p. 203). Lynchs (1985, p. 202) focus is on the modifications that colleagues effect in their own and others accounts of objects, the ways in which speakers change their descriptions . . . in the face of expressions of disagreement by others in a conversation. Such an investigation leads him to questions previously taken up by the pragmatist philosophy of science, specifically by Deweys (1988 [1938], p. 15) theory of warranted assertibility, a standard the latter sees as replacing Truth. For our present purposes, what is most significant here is the manner in which Lynch (1985, p. 203) adds to ethnomethodologys insights into the unremitting achievement of . . . technical

43 details in concerted work on the shop floor, that is, the contribution he makes to its understanding of the setting-internalspecifically, interactionalworld of the discovering sciences. Besides such studies, ethnomethodology also features a closely related line of work that directs attention to the shop floor problem within the social sciences. Garfinkel (1967, ch. 1) himself pointed toward such a research focus when he showed how coding the contents of folders in an outpatient clinic to provide a disinterested description of the clinics operations depended on a variety of embedded and tacit ad hoc considerations. Coding instructions, he (1967, p. 24) wrote, furnish a social science way of talking so as to persuade consensus and action within the practical circumstances of the clinics organized daily activities. Recent research on the survey interview (Maynard and Schaeffer 2000; Maynard, et al. 2002) continues this attention to ad hoc methods necessary to the survey-based social science enterprise. It shows how survey researchers seek to control the data collection process by standardizing the survey interview and its administration. Since no instrument or instructions (manuals, procedures) can be devised that anticipate the plenitude of emergent exigencies that accompany the interview as an in vivo task, there is always more to instructions than can be provided. This more to it involves members methods as an uncharted domain of organized activities accompanying survey manuals-, procedures-, and instruments-inuse. Maynard and Schaeffer (2000) discuss analytic alternation in the context of survey interviews as a way to investigate practitioners work, both its adherence to formal inquiryuse of rules, procedures, and instruments for conducting the interviewand deployment of taken-for-granted, tacit skills, as these are exhibited in the orderly details of talk and action that support and help achieve survey interviews as the relatively reliable and valid instrument they are taken to be. Heeding Garfinkels warning that

ethnomethodology ought not to present itself as a corrective to formal analysis, ethnomethodological studies of the survey interview do not aim to undermine the methods or findings of survey research. In pragmatist terms, a concern with social and moral reform through better democratic organization

44 is potentially addressable through the now myriad ways that what can be called applied ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies have proliferated. Besides the aforementioned science and workplace studies, these include investigations that highlight the complexities of routine endeavors, where job descriptions need to be informed by explications of actual practice (Whalen, Whalen, and Henderson 2002; Heath and Luff 2000); analyses of doctor-patient communication and of how medical education can benefit from knowledge of sequential organization (Maynard and Heritage 2005; Heritage and Maynard 2006; Heritage et al. 2007); and a line of studies that can be said to show how domination perseveres and democracy is obstructed in everyday encounters (this line of inquiry begins with the racial homicides paper of 1949 [1942] and extends through Garfinkels Agnes study [1967] to works by West and Zimmerman [1977], Celia Kitzinger [2000; Kitzinger and Frith, 1999], and Rawls [2000]; these writings all explore how race, gender, and sexuality are done or accomplishedand thereby disclose ways in which the workings of these principles of division can be undone). The various investigations we have mentioned do not merely demonstrate the member-methodic architecture on which the everyday world is built. Rather, ethnomethodology is applied ethnomethodology, as Garfinkel (2002, p. 114) once proposed; it proceeds on the assumption that its inquiries can be remedial so long as their expertise avoids generic representation and tags itself instead to the particularities of actual talk and embodied practice in concrete social settings. Ethnomethodology can engage in genuine critical reconstruction and, in a pragmatist spirit, apply intelligence to situations of real perplexity, but it can do so only provided it remains wedded to the details situationally embedded in concrete shop floor problems.

Part Four: Conversation Analysis

The last of the three great pragmatist themes we highlight in this essay is language, or linguistically

45 mediated problem-solving. This, too, is a problem-area to which pragmatism has contributed much, recognizing, in Deweys words, that Language occupies a peculiarly significant place and exercises a peculiarly significant function in the complex that forms the cultural environment. As Dewey himself nicely expressed it, although language is just one institution among others, it is (1) the agency by which other institutions and acquired habits are transmitted, and (2) it permeates both the forms and the contents of all other cultural activities. Moreover, (3) it has its own distinctive structure which is capable of abstraction as a form (Dewey 1988 [1938], p. 45, italics in original). Despite his considerable insights into language, however, here as well Dewey left unfinished business for ethnomethodologyand its close relation, conversation analysisto take up and complete. In this regard, pragmatism was hardly different from any number of other perspectives informing sociology. As Schegloff (1996a, p. 162) has noted, although language figures centrally in the organization of social life, it has remained peripheral to the main thrusts of the discipline. When not peripheral, it has been studied for the way it is stamped with abstract social and cognitive structures rather than in empirical fashion, that is, according to its actual usage and in terms or orientations that actors themselves employ or display. While the pragmatists did bring language and its integral place in human conduct to the brink of empirical investigation, they did not and could not step over a chasm created by philosophical and theoretical shortcomings inherent in their perspective. In this section, we examine some of these shortcomings, directing special attention to the following issues: (1) the inherently indexical quality of words, phrases, and utterances: the notion, that is, that context provides invariably for their sensibility; (2) the insight that language in use is not primarily about communication in the traditional sense but instead involves performing social actions of a vast variety and in organized or patterned ways; and (3) the idea that, although language use exists in behavior, such behavior need not involve taking the role of the other or internalizing rules for comporting linguistic productions, or any other such subjectivist processes. A brief revisitation of our three thinkers in this areaPeirce, Dewey,

46 and Meadwill prove useful here, together (in each case) with a consideration of how ethnomethdoology and, in particular, conversation analysis are compatible with pragmatist ideas yet move beyond them in promising new directions. We shall also discuss briefly the relevant ideas of pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom, and then, similarly, inquire into how conversation analysis helps those ideas to move from the abstract realm into that of the concrete. Before any of that, however, we shall begin with a brief overview of Garfinkels contributions to linguistic analysis, together with a discussion of the (related and seminal) contributions of his associate, Harvey Sacks. From Ethnomethodology to Conversation Analysis Garfinkels (1967, p. 1) interest in language cannot be said to have represented a first-order attraction. Rather, it derived from his preoccupation with practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study. However, from the very beginning of Studies in Ethnomethodology, he (1967, pp. 1-2) drew attention to the phenomenon of accounts of everyday activities, or verbalizations of various kinds that locate, identify, describe, categorize, analyze, or otherwise provide for the sense of practical activities. Accounts, including those that aim for scientific precision, alwaysi.e., in every particular caselack in ostensive or literal truth and verifiability; rather, they have a certain looseness to them, such that members need employ a variety of accounting practices in using and understanding those accounts. Accounting practices include, as mentioned earlier, ad hocing (et cetera, let it pass, and so forth), and they also include procedures such as supplying whatever unstated understandings are necessary to comprehend the accounts, waiting for subsequent talk to grasp fully the significance of some current saying, building up an accounts mutually elucidating particulars over the course of conversation, and orienting to the serial placement of accounts in the developing course of action. The recognizable sense of accounts always depends on the socially organized occasions of their use (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 3), which is to say, the tacit methods or practices to which members must adhere and

47 that are the universal although not invariable accompaniment to assembling accord on, or achieving the objectivity of, any account for every and all participant(s) in a setting. Accounting practices are the properties (Garfinkel 1967, p. 11) by which actors consider themselves to be remedying the occasionality or context-embeddedness of indexical expressions as they use them in the course of realizing practical actions. We shall have more to say about indexical expressions when we return shortly to the pragmatists. Just as Garfinkel did not investigate language in use because of a first-order attraction, but rather out of an interest in practical activities, Sacks developed his investigations of conversation in hopes of developing a science that could handle the details of actual social (linguistic) events and activities. Recording technology, which allows the replaying of segments of talk, transcription, and repeated observations, enabled the inquiry. Prior to the emergence of conversation analysis, the social scientific study of language was mostly in the hands of linguists. Or when sociolinguists took to the field, it was explored as either dependent or independent variables . . . rather than as process or practice (Schegloff, Ochs, and Thompson 1996, p. 12). Sacks (1992 [1964-72], pp. 622-23), howeverlike Garfinkel a sociologist through and throughasked whether a fully comprehensive, coherent linguistics is even possible if one does not come to grips with actual, even singular, utterances in their contextthe particularities and specificities of utterances as participants use them in everyday affairs. He concluded that the grammar of utterances is deeply related to their occurrence in interaction-based sequencesand therefore in a locally produced and locally determined social organizationrather than in abstract syntactic, semantic, or other cognitively based mechanisms or other elements (e.g., demographic factors) external to interaction as such. This analytic orientation was evident in Sackss famous co-authored paper, A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974, pp. 699-700), in which he and his colleagues specified the practices or methods whereby actors solve the problem of how to accomplish the feature of interaction that only one person talks at a time (they do so

48 through the achieved orderliness of turn-taking in conversational interactions). It was also evident in work on the so-called adjacency pair, in and through which indexical expressionsi.e., any and all spoken utterancescome to have their intelligibility. Adjacency pairs include greeting-greeting, question-answer, request-response, assessment-agreement or disagreement, joke-appreciation, news delivery, and manifold other sets wherein a constitutive utterance is defined and understood not only by its possible grammatical design but also by its placement contiguous to other(s) in the sequence. Drawing from Garfinkels insightsas well Goffmans (1966, 1983) attention to the neglected situation of ordinary interaction and its orderinvestigations by Sacks and his collaborators and successors provided a solid foundation for advances into problem areas brought by pragmatism to the forefront of philosophic inquiry but then left empirically untouched. That is, conversation analytic research has something to offer pragmatism and sociology more generally. But what, specifically, are these unsolved problems of the pragmatist approach to language? And how does conversation analysis, despite lacking specific engagement with pragmatist formulations, nevertheless address these problems? Language in Use Peirces investigations of language, it will be recalled, are an example of an extremely prescient approach that resonates with later linguistic philosophy. Also of interest, however, are two issues

regarding indexical expressions that his semiotic theory left empirical social science to address. One is the question of how signs actually work, the problem of (at worst) a potential for infinite regress in the signobject-interpretant relation or (at best) a certain vagueness as to how meaning is actually settled in real linguistic communities, rather than in the minds of perceivers. The other is what kind of analysis can be done with an infinite regress of semiosis, with a continuous linguistic process, with expressions whose sense is not denotative but instead somehow deeply and recursively context-dependent. While technically incisive and elegant in its own right, Peirces semiotic bequeathed to social science no actual tools for

49 empirically answering these questions. The ethnomethodological tradition, howeverincluding

conversation analysis does propose compelling ways of addressing both issues. As we have seen, one of the originating insights of this tradition is that the use of language involves indexical expressions. Garfinkel (1967, p. 44) noted that indexical expressions do not represent disordered or disorganized interaction or the potential for an infinite regress of contextual explication for their sensibility; rather, they are the precise site where social order and social organization are to be found. The orderly properties of indexical expressions, in other words, are the ongoing practical accomplishment (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970, p. 341) of participants in actual settingsand therefore capable of empirical investigation. As adumbrated above, conversation analysis represents the most sustained empirical approach to the orderliness of language in use and to indexical expressions in particular. Sackss early inquiries into how the positioning and placing of utterances provide for their intelligibility are now the starting-point of a wide array of studies on the sequential organization of conversation. Paying attention to sequences, to what happens next at each moment in relation to what it follows in a developing course of speech-based action, this body of work pursues a sustained and rigorous inquiry into indexical expressions and their social organization. Moreover, conversation analysis and cognate inquiries such as discursive social psychology (Potter and Edwards 2001) handle effectively the more general problem of context. Discourse analysts often suggest the importance of contextwider social structures in which members of society may be embeddedbut conversation analysis suggests that the more local sequential context needs first-order appreciation, because that is the environment to which participants in interaction demonstrably orient. To the extent that these participants deal with wider social structures, it is also to say that such structures will be consequential for, and thereby analytically available in, the sequential organization of the talk (Schegloff 1987). How about Deweywhat can be said of his approach to language? Of special interest here are his observations concerning language as dynamic social action, its use in and as the coordination of activities,

50 and the way its contextual embeddedness provides for meaning. Dewey (1988 [1922], p. 57) held that language, in meeting old needs, opens [up] new possibilities and is a device for undertaking human efforts of immense and ever-widening variety. He also stressed that a speaker and a hearer are both necessary to discourse and that their cooperation through act and contemporaneous response is the means by which speech and gesture enter into behavior, such that meaningful objects come to sensuous apprehension. This is fully compatible with ethnomethodologys idea of reflexivity, which holds that accounts of the objective characteristics of a setting are embedded parts of the practices that bring them to their objectivity. Finally, as one interpreter (Black 1962, p. 517) observed, Dewey contended that words find meanings in contexts such as rules, habits, methods of action, coordinations, forecasts, attitudes, plans, and designs. However, in the end, Dewey left the following problems unresolved: If language is activity, just what activities do we use it for and how? If language helps us coordinate our activities, how can we abandon the untenable notion of rule-governed stability and investigate the practices by which people act in concerted and cooperative ways? If context is important to the meaningful determination of gestural activities, including utterances and other linguistic components, how do we rigorously analyze context? (Deweys concern with defining the meaning of a word or idea by its consequences often implied or entailed employment of the very term being defined.30 ) After his probing investigation of Deweys approach to language and related topics, Black (1962, p. 523) concluded that Dewey did not approach the subject as an inquiring empiricist, eager to discover what was antecedently unknown, but rather as an investigator whose broad philosophical position was already so firmly established in his own mind that he sought illustrations rather than material for new conclusions. Picking up where Dewey left off, however, conversation analysis does find the actions that utterances perform; it does so by attending to participants orientations, as the latter are displayed in interaction. In Schegloffs (1996a, pp. 168-172) terms, the approach to action of conversation analysis encompasses at least three kinds of inquiry. One involves

51 procedural accounts of the sequentially organized practices by which participants accomplish actions and see what they are doing. Another involves locating formulations and the methods by which such formulations work to perform things like inviting someone to join a group or fishing for information. A third entails showing alternative ways of producing utteranceswhether in immediate or delayed fashion, for instanceand of accomplishing activities related to the actions already underway. For example, a (by now) well-known finding is that agreeing with a previous speakers utterance is regularly done immediately, while disagreeing usually is delayed. These patterns embody what is known as preference structure in conversation.31 Conversation analysis attends as well to some of the unfinished business in Meads view of language. Like Dewey, Mead (1964 [1903]) saw cognition not as a permanent phase or aspect of consciousness but as a moment in a process that begins when knowledge of the world breaks down and critical reflection is required. In analyzing this process, he discussed the significant symbol and the problem of meaning. In his view, a gesture or any linguistic sign has an action component to it, insofar as its design indicates a response and a resultant collaborative social act. Mead (1934, p.6 fn.6) held that language or speech can only be understood in terms of the social processes of behavior within a group of interacting organisms; . . . it is one of the activities of such a group. Repeatedly, he invoked behavior, behavioral sequences, and overt activity as the repositories of meaningful linguistic and gestural signs, in a way that undermined what Reddy (1979) has called the conduit metaphor: the idea that language use is only about communicating thoughts and ideas rather than implementing actions of various kinds. However, Mead also developed the idea that significant symbols call out in the sender the same response they call out in the recipient, or what Mead called taking the role of the other. Two important tendencies in social theory flow from this notion. One is a move toward a subjectivist approach to symbolic interaction (Blumer), in which action requires inferring the thoughts of the other; the other is a rule-

52 governed notion of language use and communication (Habermas), in which same responses are thought to depend on the internalization of grammatical rules. With either of these tendencies, analysts move away from behavioral analysis as such, undermining Meads own social behaviorist approach to language and gesture, and Mead himself never really took on language as an empirical topic in its own right. As Joas (1985, p. 117) puts it, in his theory of the origin of language, Mead restricts himself to the level of symbolic interactions and of elementary, one- and two-word sentences. His theory lacks an adequate concept of syntax as much as it does a semantics comprehending word fields and fields of meaning, or a taxonomy of the various ways in which language can be pragmatically used. While Meads writings provided insights into the abstract structures of language, their target of inquiry was always the sentence devoid of any context of experience in which an actual person has really used the sentence. This is a little like using a computer game such as Sim City to present a theory of urban development, rather than plunging into the concreteness of the social and political organization of a real citys workings. In highlighting this rather primitive theory of language in Meads work, Joas reminds us yet again of unfinished theoretical business. Pursuit of this unfinished businessspecifically by way of conversation analysismay now be due, if not overdue. Needed with respect to language use and provided by conversation analysis in a way that fulfills pragmatist sensibilities is a theory and methodology that captures how participants in interaction actually talkand how they do so using interpretants and indexical utterances with an intrinsic organization that they themselves achieve in real time. Conversation analysis offers a mode of inquiry that places priority on members methods in terms of overt practices of talk and social interaction . It does not deny subjectivity or mind; it seeks only to gain access to how the actors themselves have access to one anothers internal cogitations (to the extent that those are consequential): namely, through what is observable and reportable about concerted behavior.32 It is through participants displays in their conduct together that subjectivities

53 are made manifestand only then as an outcome of action and interaction rather than as its progenitor. If one person invites another to a movie and the recipient declines the invitation, the one may gather, through a nuanced construction of the declining utterance, that the recipient really wanted to go out (or the opposite) as a matter somewhat independent of the declination itself. By the same token, noticing the design of the invitation, its recipient may infer how sincere its speaker was in issuing it. Analytic access to the wants or desires of these actors may be built upon their practical access to such internal entities, rather than upon the analysts privileged theoretical or methodological claims, post-hoc interviews, or the like. Interestingly, through such means, even the sorts of thought processes, activities of mind, in which Mead himself was most interestednamely, those involved in intelligent problem-solving and in the creative, meliorist reconstruction of social scenescan be effectively investigated. For it is in and through linguistic interaction, as accessible to analysts of conversation, that the working-out of intelligent solutions is often visible. Returning to an example we mentioned earlier, Heritage and Lindstrm (1998) examine a Health Visitors relationship with a mother who, over the course of several visits, confesses to not having strong feelings for her newborn child. As the authors relate the story, the HV at first engages with the mother as a professional, reassuring her that this is natural. But as the mother, in subsequent visits, reveals further anxiety about her attitude toward the baby, the HV shifts from this professional stance toward becoming recognizably more personal, telling the mother, for instance, that it took her over six weeks to establish a bond with her own baby. The HVs narrative practice of speaking her own troubles is a way of entering into the experience of the mother and, in the mothers own words, is reassuring. Rather than operate as a bureaucratic baby expert, the HV relates to the mother intelligently (in a pragmatic and procedural sense), that is, as a befriending supporter (Heritage and Lindstrm 1998, p. 433), stressing that the mothers worrisome attitude toward the baby will resolve itself and implying that, far from abnormal, it can easily be recognized in contemporary technical and medical discourse. Here is a case, then, of intelligent conduct in

54 interaction, as charted and analyzed by ethnomethodological students of conversation. Making it Empirical Before concluding this section on language, it is worth making mention of Robert Brandoms 1994 book, Making It Explicit, a highly regarded and relatively recent major publication in the pragmatist tradition. One achievement of that text, as Bernstein (2007, pp. 16-17) has suggested, is to have drawn upon Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Hegel in developing a critique of epistemological and semantic representationalism in modern philosophy in favor of a theory of discursive practices. And an outcome of this critique, as we discussed earlier, is to have turned on its head Charles Morris hierarchy of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, wherein the latter is assigned the bottom rung. In sociology, Emanuel

Schegloff (1996b) has argued similarly against the notion of predication, or the idea that the proposition is fundamental to the constitution of language and language use. Just as representationalism has infected much of modern philosophy, predication underlies linguistic and traditional sociolinguistic approaches to language use. Conversation analysis replaces these approaches with an analytic orientation to the move, the action, the activity (Schegloff 1996b, p. 112) whereby sometimes, but by no means always, representation and predication may happen. That is, communicating ostensively (through representing or predicating) is only one kind of speech act among a myriad of others that include complaining, advising, ordering, reporting, announcing, discriminating, telling a story, being ironic, greeting, welcoming, and joking, and that depend neither on representation nor predication to have social force and consequence. The resonance with Brandoms critique is important. Moreover, Brandoms goal is to develop a rationalist pragmatism that involves a normative orientation to social practice. This orientation and its roots in commitments and proprieties may resonate with trust and morality in a Garfinkelian and Schutzian sense. Brandoms goal and its possible ethnomethodological resonances are matters too complex to address here. However, let us offer the

55 following two observations. First, his work again points in possibly fruitful directions for modes of inquiry that would embody our three identified pragmatist features: a return to experience, a focus on creative problem solving through real-time praxis, and an understanding of language as people actually use it for talking and acting in concert with one another. As a philosophic rather than social scientific endeavor, Brandoms discussions of anaphora, deixis, and other aspects of indexical utterances employ constructed examples, suppositions, and literary extracts to illustrate his arguments, returning us to the exact point the early pragmatists left social science in the first place: without an empirical program having theoretical underpinnings compatible with pragmatist philosophy. Second, it bears repeating that, although ethnomethodology and conversation analysis have never explicitly addressed pragmatist themes, to claim that they implicitly do so is consistent with asserting about the new pragmatists (not only Brandom but also Jeffrey Stout, Cornel West, and others) that, as Cheryl Misak (2007, pp. 1-2) has put it, they bring out the best of Peirce, James, and Dewey as resurfaced in deep, interesting and fruitful ways, whether or not these more recent thinkers are part of the pragmatist tradition. Or, as Bernstein (2007, p. 11) has said of philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson who were involved in the linguistic turn, they were able to refine and advance pragmatic themes that were anticipated by the classical pragmatists. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis present that refining and advancing ability and potential for pragmatism not in philosophy but in theory and research in the sociological tradition.

Conclusion

Prior to the Parsonian era, which coincided with the ascendancy of quantitative data analysis, pragmatist thought provided much of the underlying impulse behind American sociology. Its influence was pervasive both in the discipline and in intellectual life more generally. There has been a resurgence of

56 pragmatism in philosophy, and to a perhaps lesser but still significant extent, in social science as well (e.g., Dickstein 1998; Joas 1993, 1996). In this paper, we have sought to contribute to a revitalized pragmatism in sociology by stressing the striking thematic continuities between it and ethnomethodology, and in so doing, to demonstrate just how deeply the latter, among its other independent contributions, can relate to the grand and venerable tradition of social thought of this country. Our hope is that, by offering such arguments, we have stimulatedin good pragmatist fashionfresh new connections between estwhile distant relations, a new set of questions to explore and new studies to pursue. It does not matter that the young Garfinkel, in his concern to separate his way of thinking from the symbolic interactionism of his day, distanced himself as well from classical American pragmatism, aligning himself instead with Continental phenomenologists and gestalt theorists such as Husserl, Schutz, and Gurwitsch. Nor does it matter that, in seeking to bring about an intellectual revolution in his field, to recover its neglected or lost essence (a strategy typical of subversives), he invoked the sacred figure of Durkheim rather than, say, of Peirce, Dewey, or Mead. What is important here are the fundamental commonalities between the pragmatism that prevailed in the years of Garfinkels early intellectual development and the unique, even revolutionary mode of inquiry that he and his followers, including in the field of conversation analysis, went on to elaborate. Once we recognize these commonalities among the two projects, we can make valuable progress toward realizing the aims they share, each enterprise fortified, perhaps, by the insights and admonitions of the other. As Levine (1996, p. 276) has put it, while the variegated theoretical traditions in sociology have developed from a common Aristotelian heritage to yield an array of distinctive sociological orientations, and while those orientations have developed internally, they have also benefited from cross-theoretical dialogues. If that is true internationally, it must also be the case that two autochthonous U.S. theoretical traditions can speak to one another in fruitful ways even when heretofore they have not sought to do so.

57 We have suggested three ways in which pragmatism and ethnomethodology converge or at least can be in the kind of dialogue that Levine and, interestingly enough, Rorty (1979, p. 318) before him advocated. First, the return to experience means eschewing analyses that depend on inert background and other abstractions and bringing social life as it is lived in its member-produced practices to the forefront of sociological inquiry. Second, a focus on creative problem-solvingalways a prime concern of the pragmatists and recently analyzed by Joas (1996, p. 144; ch. 3) as situated creativity to be found in the full spectrum of human action rather than in a narrow swath (as in artistic endeavors)leads to a theoretical approach that is non-teleological in character, comprehends embodied activity and language use, and captures actors pre-reflective competencies. Such considerations point toward ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic research because there are few other theoretically informed empirical endeavors that fit Joas criteria so well. Finally, language is a venerable pragmatist topic, as in Deweys formulations about its eventful as well as eventual character in use and Meads preoccupation with significant symbols. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are cognate with pragmatism insofar as they are concerned with understanding utterances both as context dependent in a local and temporally developing sense and as a site for social action and interactionand intent on analyzing them in a way that captures their pragmatically cooperative (or, in ethnomethodological terms, collaborative or co-produced) character. One might ask what is the significance of drawing this new map, of pointing out the interlinkages between two geographies. The answer is that, as Levine (1995, p. 293) has proposed, redrawing the map of the social sciences lessens the salience of rigid theoretical boundaries and of superficial narratives of theoretical and empirical unity based on exclusivity. A new map can join territories that have been thought to consist of irreducible differences. Of course, regarding attempts at altering cartography, Dewey (1988 [1925], p. 125) once observed: It may be [objected] that it [is] not the world which [is] changed but only the map. In counterpoint, however, as Dewey himself immediately added, there is the obvious retort that

58 after all the map is part of the world, not something outside it, and that its meaning and bearings are so important that a change in the map involves other and still more important objective changes. Possibilities, in other words, are tangible and clear for mutual enrichment of the two traditions of pragmatism and ethnomethodology, and such boundary-crossing can only add to the excitement and fruitfulness of each and the sociological tradition as a whole. References

Addams, Jane. 2002 [1902]. Democracy and Social Ethics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Arminen , Ilkka. 2005. Institutional Interaction: Studies of Talk at Work. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Auspitz, Josiah Lee. 1994. The Wasp Leaves the Bottle: Charles Sanders Peirce. The American Scholar 63:602-18. Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. 1954. Indexical Expressions. Mind 63:659-79. Bernstein, Richard J. 1992. The Resurgence of Pragmatism. Social Research 59:813-40. -----. 2007. The New Pragmatists. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28:3-38. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Black, Max. 1962. Deweys Philosophy of Language. Journal of Philosophy 59:505-23. Blumer, Herbert. 1937. Social Psychology. Pp. 144-98 in Man and Society, edited by Emerson P. Schmidt. New York: Prentice-Hall. Brandom, Robert B. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1969 [1945]. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. -----. 1935. Permanance and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. New York: New Republic, Inc.

59 Camic, Charles, and Neil Gross. 2001. The New Sociology of Ideas. Pp. 236-49 in The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, edited by Judith R. Blau. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Clayman, Steven E., and Virginia Teas Gill. 2004. Conversation Analysis. Pp. 589-606 in Handbook of Data Analysis, edited by Melissa Hardy and Alan Bryman. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Colapietro, Vincent. 2009. A Revised Portrait of Human Agency: A Critical Engagement with Hans Joass Creative Appropriate of the Pragmatic Approach. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy I:1-23. Dewey, John. 1972 [1896]. The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology. Pp. 152-88 in Early Essays. John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898. Volume 5: 1882-1898. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. -----. 1985 [1915]. The Logic of Judgments of Practice. Pp. 14-82 in Essays on Education and Politics. John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924. Volume 8: 1915. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. -----. 1988 [1920]. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Pp. 77-202 in Reconstruction in Philosophy and Essays. John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924. Volume 12: 1920. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. -----. 1988 [1922]. Human Nature and Conduct. John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924. Volume 14: 1922. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. -----. 1988 [1925]. Experience and Nature. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Volume 1: 1925. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. -----. 1988 [1927]. The Public and its Problems. Pp. 235-372 in Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and The Public and its Problems. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Volume 2: 1925-1927. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

60 -----. 1988 [1929]. The Quest for Certainty. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Volume 4: 1929. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. -----. 1988 [1938]. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Volume 12: 1938. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John, and Arthur F. Bentley. 1991 [1949]. Knowing and the Known. Pp. 1-294 in Essays, Typescripts, and Knowing and the Known. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953. Volume16: 1949-1952. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dickstein, Morris, ed. 1998. The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1982 [1895]. The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. Edited by Steven Lukes. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: Free Press. Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. 1997. Critical Discourse Analysis. Pp. 259-84 in Discourse as Social Interaction, edited by Teun A. van Dijk. London: Sage. Fine, Gary Alan, ed. 1995. A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garfinkel, Harold. 1940. Color Trouble. Opportunity 18 (May):144-52. -----.1941. Color Trouble. Pp. 97-119 in The Best Short Stories 1941 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story, edited by Edward J. OBrien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. -----. 1949 [1942]. Research Note on Inter- and Intra-Racial Homicides. Social Forces 27:369-81. -----. 1952. The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Social Relations. Harvard University. -----. 1963. A Conception of, and Experiments with, Trust as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions. Pp. 187-238 in Motivation and Social Interaction, edited by O. J. Harvey. New York: Ronald

61 Press. -----. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. -----. 1968. The Origins of the Term Ethnomethodology. Pp. 5-11 in Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology, edited by Richard J. Hill and Kathleen Stones Crittenden. Institute Monograph Series, No. 1. Institute for the Study of Social Change, Purdue University. -----. 1996. Ethnomethodologys Program. Social Psychology Quarterly 59:5-21. -----. 2002. Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheims Aphorism. Edited by Anne Warfield Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. -----. 2004a. The Shop Floor Problem in the Renewal of Sociologys Distinctive Study of Social Order. Lecture in theory@madison. Department of Sociology. University of Wisconsin at Madison. -----. 2004b. Foreword. Pp. ix-xiii in Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Formal Reasoning, by Kenneth Liberman. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. -----. 2005 [1948]. Seeing Sociologically: The Routine Grounds of Social Action. Original title: Prospectus for an Exploratory Study of Communicative Effort and the Modes of Understanding in Selected Types of Dyadic Relationship. Edited by Anne Warfield Rawls. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Garfinkel, Harold, Michael Lynch, and Eric Livingston. 1981. The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11:131-158. Garfinkel, Harold, and Harvey Sacks. 1970. On Formal Structures of Practical Actions. Pp. 338-66 in Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments, edited by John C. McKinney and Edward A. Tiryakian. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Garfinkel, Harold, and D. Lawrence Wieder. 1992. Two Incommensurable, Asymmetrically Alternate

62 Technologies of Social Analysis. Pp. 175-217 in Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology, edited by Graham Watson and R.M. Seiler. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Goffman, Erving. 1964. "The Neglected Situation. American Anthropologist 66 (II):133-136 [Special issue on The Ethnography of Communication, edited by John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes.] -----. 1983. "The Interaction Order." American Sociological Review 48:1-17. Gurwitsch, Aron. 1964. The Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff. 2000. Documents and Professional Practice: Bad Organizational Reasons for Good Clinical Records. Pp. 31-60 in Technology in Action, edited by Christian Heath and Paul Luff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. -----. 1987. Ethnomethodology. Pp. 224-72 in Social Theory Today, edited by Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner. Stanford: Stanford University Press. -----. 2002. Ad Hoc Inquiries: Two Preferences in the Design of Routine Questions in an Open Context. Pp. 313-334 in Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview, edited by Douglas W. Maynard, Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra, Nora Cate Schaeffer, and Johannes van der Zouwen. New York: Wiley Interscience. Heritage, John, and Anna Lindstrm. 1998. Motherhood, Medicine, and Morality: Scenes from a Medical Encounter. Research on Language and Social Interaction 31:397-438. Heritage, John and Sue Sefi. 1992. Dilemmas of Advice: Aspects of the Delivery and Reception of Advice in Interactions Between Health Visitors and First Time Mothers. Pp. 359-417 in Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, edited by Paul Drew and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, John, Jeffrey D. Robinson, Marc N. Elliott, Megan Beckett, and Michael Wilkes. 2007.

63 Reducing Patients Unmet Concerns in Primary Care: The Difference One Word Can Make. Journal of General Internal Medicine. 22:1429-1433. Hilbert, Richard A. 1981. Toward an Improved Understanding of Role. Theory and Society 10:207-26. Hildebrand, David L. 1995. Was Kenneth Burke a Pragmatist? Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 31:632-58. Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1966. The Intellectual Genesis of C. Wright Mills. Pp. 11-31 in Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America, by C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. James, William. 1905[1890]). Principles of Psychology Vol. 1. New York: H. Holt and Co. -----. 1987 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Pp. 1-478 in William James: Writings 1902-1910. New York: The Library of America. -----. 1981 [1907]. Pragmatism. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. -----. 1981 [1909]. The Meaning of Truth. Pp. 167-352 in Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. -----. 2003 [1912]. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Mineola, NY: Dover. Joas, Hans. 1993. Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -----. 1995. G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-Examination of his Thought. Chicago: M.I.T. Press. -----. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -----. 1998. The Inspiration of Pragmatism: Some Personal Remarks. Pp. 190-98 in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, edited by Morris Dickstein. Durkham, NC: Duke University Press. -----. 2000. The Genesis of Values. Translated by Gregory Moore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

64 -----. 2003. War and Modernity: Studies in the History of Violence in the 20th Century. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Oxford: Polity Press. -----. 2007. Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence. Translated by Alex Skinner. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Joas, Hans, and Jens Beckert. 2002. A Theory of Action: Pragmatism and the Creativity of Action. Transactional Viewpoints 1:1-4. Joas, Hans, and Wolfgang Knobl. 2009. Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures. Translated by Alex Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kestenbaum, Victor. 1977. The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Levine, Donald N. 1995. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Livingston, Eric. 1986. Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. London: Routledge. Lynch, Michael. 1985. Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lynch, Michael. 1993. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maynard, Douglas W. 2003. Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -----. 2005. Social Actions, Gestalt Coherence, and Designations of Disability: Lessons from and about Autism. Social Problems 52:499-524. Maynard, Douglas W. and Nora Cate Schaeffer. 2000. Toward a Sociology of Social Scientific Knowledge: Survey Research and Ethnomethodologys Asymmetric Alternates. Social Studies of Science 30:323-70.

65 -----. 2002. Standardization and Its Discontents. Pp. 3-46 in Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview, edited by Douglas W. Maynard, Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra, Nora Cate Schaeffer, and Johannes van der Zouwen. New York: Wiley Interscience. Maynard, Douglas W., Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra, Nora Cate Schaeffer, and Johannes van der Zouwen, eds. 2002. Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview. New York: Wiley. Mead, George H. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -----. 1964 [1903]. The Definition of the Psychical. Pp. 25-59 in Selected Writings, edited by Andrew J. Reck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1940. Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review 5:904-13. Misak, Cheryl. 2007. Introduction. Pp. 1-xx in New Pragmatists. New York: Oxford University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1932 [c. 1897]. A Fragment. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Volume 2. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. -----. 1992 [1868]. Some Consequences of Four Incapacities. Pp. 28-55 in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Volume 1: 1867-1893. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. -----. 1992 [1877]. The Fixation of Belief. Pp. 109-23 in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Volume 1: 1867-1893. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. -----. 1992 [1878]. How to Make Our Ideas Clear. Pp. 124-41 in The Essential Peirce: Selected

66 Philosophical Writings. Volume 1: 1867-1893. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pollner, Melvin. 1987. Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -----. 1991. Left of Ethnomethodology: The Rise and Decline of Radical Reflexivity. American Sociological Review 56:370-80. Pollner, Melvin, and Robert M. Emerson. 2001. Ethnomethodology and Ethnography. Pp. 118-35 in Handbook of Ethnography, edited by Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland. London: Sage. Pomerantz, Anita M. 1980. Telling My Side: Limited Access as a Fishing Device. Sociological Inquiry 50:186-98. -----. 1984. Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes. Pp. 57-101 in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Posner, Richard A. 1991. The Problems of Jurisprudence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Potter, Jonathan, and Derek Edwards. 2001. Discursive Social Psychology. Pp. 103-18 in The New Handbook of Language and Social Psychology, edited by W. Peter Robinson and Howard Giles. London: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Potter, Jonathan, and Hedwig te Molder. 2005. Talking Cognition: Mapping and Making the Terrain. Pp. 1-54 in Conversation and Cognition, edited by Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, Anne Warfield. 2000. Race as an Interaction Order Phenomenon: W.E.B. Du Boiss Double Consciousness Thesis Revisited. Sociological Theory 18:241-74.

67 -----. 2002. Editors Introduction. Pp. 1-64 in Ethnomethodology's Program, by Harold Garfinkel, edited by Anne Warfield Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. -----. 2006. Respecifying the Study of Social OrderGarfinkels Transition from Theoretical Conceptualization to Practices in Details. Pp. 1-97 in Seeing Sociologically: The Routine Grounds of Social Action, by Harold Garfinkel, edited by Anne Warfield Rawls. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The Conduit Metaphor. Pp. 284-324 in Metaphor and Thought, edited by Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sabel, Charles. 1994. Learning by Monitoring: The Institutions of Economic Development. Pp. 137-65 in The Handbook of Economic Sociology, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Sacks, Harvey. 1992 [1964-72]. Lectures on Conversation. Volumes I and II. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation. Language 50:696-735. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1992. Introduction to Lectures on Conversation. Volume I: Fall 1964-Spring 1968. Pp. ix-lxii in Lectures on Conversation. Volumes I and II, by Harvey Sacks. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell. -----. 1987. "Between Macro and Micro: Contexts and Other Connections." Pp. 207-234 in The MicroMacro Link, edited by J. Alexander, R. Munch B. Giesen, and N. Smelser. Berkeley: University of California Press.

68 -----. 1996a. Confirming Allusions: Toward an Empirical Account of Action. American Journal of Sociology 102:161-216. -----. 1996b. "Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction." Pp. 52-133 in Interaction and Grammar, edited by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schegloff, Emanuel A., Elinor Ochs, and Sandra A. Thompson. 1996. "Introduction." Pp. 1-51 in Interaction and Grammar, edited by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1967 [1945]. On Multiple Realities. Pp. 207-59 in Collected Papers. Volume I: The Problem of Social Reality. Edited by Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. -----. 1967 [1953]. Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action. Pp. 3-47 in Collected Papers. Volume I: The Problem of Social Reality. Edited by Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. -----. 1976 [1943]. The Problem of Rationality in the Social World. Pp. 64-88 in Collected Papers. Volume II: Studies in Social Theory. Edited by Arvid Brodersen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Scott, Marvin B., and Stanford M. Lyman. 1968. Accounts. American Sociological Review 33: 4662. Searle, Leroy F. 2005 [1994]. Charles Sanders Peirce. Pp. 723-26 in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1996. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shalin, Dmitri N. 1986. Pragmatism and Social Interactionism. American Sociological Review 51:9-29.

69 Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1956. Husserls and Peirces Phenomenologies: Coincidence or Interaction. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 17:164-185. Suchman, Lucy A. 1987. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. te Molder, Hedwig, and Jonathan Potter. 2005. Conversation and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ten Have, Paul. 1999. Doing Conversation Analysis. London: Sage. Tilly, Charles. 2006. Why? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. 2007. The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. van Dijk, Teun, ed. 2006. Special Issue: Discourse, Interaction, and Cognition. Discourse Studies 8. Viterna, Jocelyn, and Douglas W. Maynard. 2002. How Uniform is Standardization? Variation Within and Across Survey Centers Regarding Protocols for Interviewing. Pp. 365-97 in Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview, edited by Douglas W. Maynard, Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra, Nora Cate Schaeffer, and Johannes van der Zouwen. New York: Wiley Interscience. West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Whitford, Josh. 2002. Pragmatism and the Untenable Dualism of Means and Ends: Why Rational Choice Theory Does Not Deserve Paradigmatic Privilege. Theory and Society 31:325-63. Wieder, D. Lawrence. 1974. Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code. The Hague: Mouton. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York:

70 Macmillan. Zimmerman, Don H. 1970. The Practicalities of Rule Use. Pp. 221-38 in Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge, edited by Jack D. Douglas. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Znaniecki, Florian. 1919. Cultural Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Endnotes

In the final chapter of The Creativity of Action (1996), Joas lays out some of the implications of his

theoretical ideas regarding action for theories of social order and social change, focusing, among other things, on theories of collective action and differentiation. He focuses on economic sociology in a brief essay co-authored with Jens Beckert (2002). Intriguing as well is the attempt by Josh Whitford (2002) to bridge Joass theoretical insights with the empirical research program of Charles Sabel (see fn. 2). For Joass studies on war and religion, respectively, see Joas (2000, 2003); on the question of the genesis of values, see Joas (2000). For a close look at his major work, The Creativity of Action, see Colapietro

(2009); for a broad overview of his lifes work to date, see Joas and Knobl (2009, pp. 512-28). Interestingly, in a chapter on ethnomethodology in that latter work (Ch. VII, p. 152; cf. Joas 1996, p. 162), the authors allude briefly to certain action-theoretic similarities between Garfinkel and pragmatism. Our aim is to pursue these linkages more extensively and systematically.
2

We cannot claim, of course, that the above list of mid-century and contemporary thinkers influenced by

pragmatism is anywhere near exhaustive. Nor can it be our goal to cover, in the limited space available, everyone who fits such a description. There are severe constraints upon what we can do. Perhaps the most notable omission is Erving Goffman, who was deeply influenced in his thinking by George Herbert Mead. A highly complex, sui generis thinker, the specific respects in which his ideas were inspired by

71

pragmatism nonetheless place him, for the purposes at hand, within the category of symbolic interactionism. More recent thinkers also not mentioned include Charles Sabel (1994); Roberto Unger (2007); and Richard Posner (1991). One concentric circle further removed, moreover, are pragmatist fellow-travellers such as Charles Tilly, who asserts in Why? (2006, p. x) that If this were an academic treatise, I would surely trace my line of argument back through American pragmatism via John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.
3

Again, to prevent misunderstanding, we underscore that other ways do exist of attending to pragmatisms

unfinished business; we focus here on only one of these, rather than attempt to discuss them all. Besides ethnomethodology and conversation analysis there is also symbolic interactionism, the most venerable, influential, and important of all pragmatism-inspired research programs in sociology. Prior to this, there was also the work of the first Chicago School; see also the work mentioned in fns. 1 and 2.
4

He expresses this perhaps most eloquently in Experience and Nature (1988 [1925], p. 372): When the

varied constituents of the wide universe, the unfavorable, the precarious, uncertain, irrational, hateful, receive the same attention that is accorded the noble, honorable, and true, then philosophy may conceivably dispense with the conception of experience. But till that day arrives, we need a cautionary and directive word, like experience, to remind us that the world which is lived, suffered, and enjoyed as well as logically thought of, has the last word in all human inquiries and surmises.
5

We leave aside here the question of Jamess (1987 [1902]) empirical investigations into the

phenomenology of religious experience.

6

In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1988 [1938], ch. VI), Dewey coined the phrase indeterminate

situation to describe such circumstances.

7

For surveys of pragmatisms influence on twentieth century sociology (and social thought, more

generally), see Shalin (1986); West (1989); Joas (1993); Levine (1995); Seigfried (1996); and Dickstein

72

(1998). On the later incarnations of the Chicago School, see Fine (1995).
8

It is during these years that Garfinkel attended college at the University of Newark, earned a Masters

degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did his military service in World War II, and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard (under the supervision of Talcott Parsons). Biographical material for this paragraph is taken from Rawls (2002, 2005) and Garfinkel (2002, pp. 77-87).
9

On Selznicks relation to pragmatism, see Joas (1998, p. 193); on W.I. Thomass, see Joas (1993, pp. 29-

32); on Znanieckis, see, in addition to the aforementioned source on Thomas, Znaniecki (1919, pp. xiiixiv); on Burkes, see Hildebrand (1995). Although C. Wright Millss early pragmatism-influenced writings were already appearing in prominent venues, Garfinkel was not yet familiar with them; on Millss relation to pragmatism, see Horowitz (1966).
10

Biographically speaking, Garfinkel was familiar with Continental phenomenology since his very earliest

years at UNC. In addition, during his time at Harvard, he interacted frequently with Alfred Schutz at the New School for Social Research and with Aron Gurwitsch at Brandeis. (See, again, Rawls [2002], [2005]; and Garfinkel [2002, pp. 77-87].)
11

In the quotation within this quotation, Garfinkel used the language of the court and was not speaking for

himself.
12

For a detailed discussion of Garfinkels engagement with pragmatist themes in this work, one that takes a

different tack than the one pursued here, see the introduction by Anne Warfield Rawls (2005), e.g., pp. 5961. Rawls documents a sustained dialogue on Garfinkels part with pragmatist authors and ideas, although, as we shall suggest in what follows, that dialogue was not very complete or systematic from a pragmatist perspective.
13

Phenomenological arguments came before his references to the pragmatists as well. For instance, his

aforementioned reference to Peirce appeared in the context of Garfinkels describing how, from an actors

73

point of view, objects are real things even if analytically they can be decomposed into temporally successive acts and noemata, a Husserlian term that connotes perceptual adumbrations through which actors produce the sense of facticity to things. Such working acts, as Garfinkel (2005 [1948], p. 144) argued, form the structural makeup that gives definition and meaning to social objects, including selves and identities.
14

Garfinkels embrace of phenomenology, both in terms of theorizing and of data, was complete by the

time of his (still unpublished) Ph.D. dissertation (1952). However, we refrain from discussing this work in the present context, as our aim here is not to present a complete account of Garfinkels intellectual development but rather to chart briefly the trajectory of his early engagement with pragmatism. On ethnomethodologys relation to phenomenology, however, see Heritage (1984, ch. 3) and Lynch (1993, ch. 4).
15

For his part, Husserl, too, was influenced by James, although, according to Spiegelberg (1956), he was

more impressed with James Principles of Psychology (1905[1890]) than with Pragmatism. (1981 [1907]).
16

The relations between phenomenology and pragmatism, and how they affect sociological views of

language and the self, are an important topic in their own right, which we cannot address here. Kestenbaum (1977) explores the possible connection between Deweys notion of habit and phenomenological approaches to intentionality; Spiegelberg (1956) compares Pierces and Husserls phenomenologies, rejecting the idea that they reflect mutual influence but suggesting that there are at least coincidental areas of agreement.
17

For a comprehensive survey of the new sociology of ideas, see Camic and Gross (2001). On the origins of the term ethnomethodology and how the term was originally meant to capture the

18

availability of commonsense knowledge and methods whereby members of a society hold one another accountable to that knowledge as a practical matter, see Garfinkel (1974, pp. 16-17).

74

19

Specifically, this Durkheimian aphorism consists of a reference, in The Rules of Sociological Method

(1982 [1895], p. 45), to our basic principle, that of the objective reality of social facts. Durkheim declared: It is . . . upon this principle that in the end everything rests, and everything comes back to it. Garfinkel invoked this aphorism in the opening pages of Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967, pp. vii-viii), and he underscored it all the more in his second collection, Ethnomethodologys Program (2002), which bears the subtitle, Working Out Durkheims Aphorism.
20

On the way in which actions and not just objects of perceptions are gestalt-type accomplishments, see

Maynard (2005).
21

Perhaps Garfinkel and the pragmatists converged on this theoretical position because there are logically

only so many theoretical positions possible in the space of theories of action; see Levine (1995).
22

Garfinkel (1967, p. 173) observed: In the conduct of his everyday affairs[,] in order for the person to

treat rationally the one-tenth of [his] situation that, like an iceberg appears above the water, he must be able to treat the nine-tenths that lies below as an unquestioned and, perhaps even more interestingly, as an unquestionable background of matters . . . which appear without even being noticed.
23

This affinity on Garfinkels part with Heidegger, at least with the latters way of rejecting conventional

approaches to philosophizing, is unsurprising in light of Rortys (1979, pp. 6-7) observation that it was Heidegger, along with Dewey (he also mentions Wittgenstein), who brought us into a period of revolutionary philosophy . . . by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate.
24

Garfinkel recounted in Ethnomethodologys Program (2002, pp. 80, 95 fn. 7; see also Garfinkel 2004a;

Garfinkel 2004b, p. x) the circumstances in which he initially used the term shop floor problem. He recalled that, in 1994, he attended, at Beryl Bellmans invitation, a conference on workplace difficulties at McDonnell Douglas. Bellman and his colleagues (the latter all aerospace engineers) served as consultants

75

to that firm, and it was they who labelled its quandariesspecifically, the disparity between the actual work of those building its C-47 airplanes and the firms front office protocol accounts of production costs, protocols that ha[d] lost sight of [that work] (Garfinkel 2004b, p. x)The Shop Floor Problem. Garfinkel indicated that it was from this team of consultants that he appropriated the term, generalizing it to subsume a much wider range of sociological phenomena.
25

His [2002, ch. 9] still later-published work on Galileos inclined plane demonstrationmuch of it

undertaken, however, around the same time as the pulsar studycovered (in this respect) similar ground.
26

To be more precise here, the term shop floor problem first appearedwith a brief discussionin

Garfinkels Cooley-Mead Lecture, Ethnomethodologys Program (1996; the contents of this paper are reprinted in Ethnomethodologys Program [2002, chs. 1 and 5]). Garfinkel (1996, p. 9) wrote in that paper: [Ethnomethodologys] findings are found [in ethnomethodological studies of work and science] in the phenomena of two constitutents of the Shop Floor Problem: (1) shop floor achievements and their accompanying careful* descriptions, and (2) shop floor theorizing. (Careful* denotes the concrete practices of order production with which ethnomethodology, by contrast to formal analysis, is concerned.) It is only in the 2002 work, however, that the idea of a shop floor problem received sustained attention.
27

Garfinkel and Wieder (1992, pp. 182-84) termed this the unique adequacy requirement. Interestingly,

Pollner and Emerson (2001, p. 123) observe in respect to it: As EM focuses more intensely on specialized settings, the earlier methodological goal of making the familiar strange is replaced by efforts to make the strange familiar. For this recent development in EM, the fusion of local and analytic knowledge and competencies is not a problem, but a goal.
28

Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston (1981, p. 133) distinguish the discovering from the social sciences in

the following manner: The social sciences are talking sciences, and achieve in texts, not elsewhere, the observability and practical objectivity of their phenomena. . . . Social sciences are not discovering sciences.

76

Unlike hard sciences they cannot lose their phenomena; they cannot undertake the search for a phenomenon as a problem to be solved, finally be unable to do so, and thus have wasted time; they do not know the indispensability of bricolage expertise; and these are never local conditions of their inquiries and theorizing.
29

Arguably, Lynchs inquiry falls a bit short of qualifying as a hybrid study of work, since, as he (1985, p.

2) himself confesses, he never approached a practitioners skills and was unable to participate in the labs researches, although he did achieve limited competences.
30

A metaphor that Black (1962, p. 520) invoked is that of the automobile: to know how its gears contribute

to the whole machine, it is not necessary to point to the work of the gears literally. One can observe the actions of the automobile in relation to the turning of the gears and in terms of their consequences; the gears are a feature of what the automobile does as a vehicle in action. By extension, Dewey could have been implying an ethnomethodological theme: that words cannot be defined by their consequences so much as they are understandable in reflexive relation to the accounting practices in which they are embedded.
31

For examples, see Sacks (1992, pp. 300-305); Pomerantz (1980, 1984); ten Have (1999); Heritage

(1984); Clayman and Gill (2004); and Arminen (2005).

32

For recent work on conversation and cognition, see te Molder and Potter (2005) and especially Potter

and te Molders (2005) introduction to that collection; see also van Dijk (2006).