All posts filed under Ethnomethodology
I was not very impressed by Livingston’s (2024) critique (Rooke 2025), but his subsequent exchange with Mike Lynch has brought out the best in him (Lynch 2025, Livingston 2025). It’s odd that both Lynch and I mistook his main target as Harold Garfinkel, but let that pass. Now that he has made clear that his
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A review of Livingston, E. (2024) ‘Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,’ Human Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09770-1 The title of Livingston’s paper should read ‘Garfinkel’s broken promise’. EM has produced many studies of the type which Livingston complains are missing from Garfinkel’s oeuvre, some produced by Livingston himself. Nevertheless, Livingston is apparently upset that Garfinkel himself produced none. It is difficult
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A review of Livingston, E. (2024) ‘Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,’ Human Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09770-1 Livingston illustrates what he proposes to be the failure of Garfinkel’s studies primarily with reference to two chapters of Ethnomethodology’s Program, and the paper more recently edited by Lynch (Garfinkel 2022). An interesting feature of all these studies is that they were published
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The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein will be very important to this blog. He demolished the philosophical theory that the sole function of language is to represent the world, pointing to the other vital uses that language has. Nevertheless, this disproven theory still has a powerful grip on much of our thinking, even (or perhaps especially)
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