Papers by douglas maynard
Sociological Theory, 1991
... Page 4. GOFFMAN, GARFINKEL, AND GAMES 279 "female" things such as dressing,... more ... Page 4. GOFFMAN, GARFINKEL, AND GAMES 279 "female" things such as dressing, shopping, and cooking. Instead, Agnes learned in the very midst of those discussions what she needed to know in order to carry them off as "any" female would. ...
Contemporary Sociology, 1984
Contemporary Sociology, 1983
... Making sense of reification: Alfred Schutz and constructionist theory. Post a Comment. CONTRI... more ... Making sense of reification: Alfred Schutz and constructionist theory. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Thomason, Burke C. PUBLISHER: Humanities Press (Atlantic Highlands, NJ). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1982. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0391023500 ). VOLUME/EDITION ...
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2008
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 27, 2022
Conversation analysis is undoubtedly the most visible and conventionally successful of Garfinkel’... more Conversation analysis is undoubtedly the most visible and conventionally successful of Garfinkel’s legacies. Yet the lineage is complex. This chapter traces it, first, by discussing Garfinkel’s initial interest, as revealed in an early (1948) dissertation proposal, in the domain of human interaction. He specifically addressed analytical problems related to the concision of speech (that it conveys much more than what is said), and the associated context-dependency of meaning, whereby linguistic expressions—later termed indexical expressions—gain their meaning by way of their context. Interaction and speech, in Garfinkel’s early work, were explicated using phenomenological resources, including the study of background expectancies, presuppositions accessed through breaching experiments and other demonstrations, and analysis of the documentary method of interpretation. Harvey Sacks’s approach was more direct, less theoretical, and habilitated the direct study of interaction through a selective engagement with key Garfinkelian stances and ideas. Sacks also drew from Erving Goffman concerning the interaction order, and from a variety of other scholars and works. The result was a focus on specimens of actual speech, coupled with methodological innovations related to membership categories as an aspect of common-sense knowledge, the sequential organization of talk, and increasingly sophisticated ways of working with collections of phenomena to delineate interactional activities and practices. This creative synthesis, and the conversation analytic discipline that emerged from it, was conditioned by Sacks’s own abiding interest in advancing a highly rigorous but thoroughly emic science of the “witnessable order” of human interaction.
Patient Education and Counseling, Feb 1, 2019
Annual Review of Sociology
This article considers the large range of empirical research that has emerged under the broad aeg... more This article considers the large range of empirical research that has emerged under the broad aegis of ethnomethodology, in the period between the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) and the present day. Starting with a brief overview of Garfinkel's intellectual career, we discuss the relation of ethnomethodology to Schütz's phenomenology, Parsons's systems theory, and Weber's concern with meaning construction. A central concern was with the problem of contextuality, which Garfinkel initially addressed by drawing on, while fashioning in his own way, Mannheim's concern with the documentary method of interpretation. Ethnomethodologically-related studies have proliferated in a variety of domains, including conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, and (related to Garfinkel's own early work) empirical initiatives in the study of everyday life involving racial, gender and other minoritized groups. Further ethnomethodological studies ...
Sociology of Health & Illness
This article follows Blaxter’s foundational call for a sociology of diagnosis that addresses the ... more This article follows Blaxter’s foundational call for a sociology of diagnosis that addresses the dual aspects of diagnosis‐as‐category and diagnosis‐as‐process. Drawing on video recordings from an autism clinic, we show how the process of attaching the diagnosis to a child involves interactions between clinicians, parents and children, and that in the course of such interactions, a diagnostic category officially defined in terms of deficits can instead be formulated in terms of valuable social and cognitive differences. More specifically, we show that the child’s age is crucial for how clinicians formulate the diagnosis: with younger children, clinicians treat autism exclusively as a deficit to be remedied, whereas with older children, clinicians may treat autism either as a deficit or as a social‐cognitive difference. Further, because older children are often co‐recipients of diagnostic news, we find that clinicians carefully manage the implications such news may have for their sel...
The Ethnomethodology Program
Despite its dependency on common-sense knowledge, sociology as a field has yet to confront the fa... more Despite its dependency on common-sense knowledge, sociology as a field has yet to confront the fact that there simply is no time out from its use at any level of practical endeavor, including the most sophisticated theoretical and methodological efforts of scientific activity itself. The theme of this chapter is to suggest why the wider discipline could benefit from increased ethnomethodological inquiry, and to demonstrate just how such inquiry and its offshoot, conversation analysis (CA), contribute to the profession and larger society. Such endeavors were well within the realm of Garfinkel’s own ambitions. To get at the devices of commonsense, Garfinkel’s (1967: 37) stated preference was to “start with familiar scenes and ask what can be done to make trouble”—for example, directing his students to question what their friends, acquaintances, or partners meant by the most commonplace remarks. However, that strategy leaves uninvestigated more naturalistic breaches and the forms of re...
The Ethnomethodology Program
Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) was published a little more than 50 yea... more Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) was published a little more than 50 years ago. Since then, there has been a substantial—although often subterranean—growth in ethnomethodological work and influence. Studies in and appreciation of ethnomethodological work continue to grow, but the breadth and penetration of his insights and inspiration for ongoing research have yet to secure their full measure of recognition. The first part of this chapter reviews the development of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, whose origins include both the theorizing of Parsonian sociology and the phenomenology of Alfred Schütz. The authors discuss ethnomethodology’s orientation to the trust conditions making for a stable society, the “documentary method of interpretation,” rules and rule usage, and phenomena of language use and accountability. The second part of the chapter describes ethnomethodology’s legacies—its contributions to such areas or subdisciplines as conversation analysis (CA...
Emergent Methods in Social Research
In her book Thinking in Pictures, Temple Grandin (2006, pp. 154–155) describes the problems that ... more In her book Thinking in Pictures, Temple Grandin (2006, pp. 154–155) describes the problems that “rigid thinking” can create in the social lives of autistic adults. She recounts how one young man “became romantically interested in a girl and went to her house wearing a football helmet to disguise himself. He thought it would be alright to look in her windows. In his literal, visual mind he thought that since he would not be recognized, it was okay to stand outside and watch for her.”
Communication in Medical Care
A Practical Guide to Social Interaction Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2017
Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, 2016
Ethnomethodology (EM) is a theoretical paradigm created by American sociologist Harold Garfinkel.... more Ethnomethodology (EM) is a theoretical paradigm created by American sociologist Harold Garfinkel. It is one of the twentieth century schools of sociology strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology. Although EM is similar in certain respects to the various strands of social phenomenology created and influenced by Alfred Schutz and his students, its approach to the empirical study of social action differs in several important ways, with key tenets involving indexical expressions, accountability, and reflexivity. After presenting examples of classic EM research by Garfinkel and his colleagues, and discussing the relationship between EM and the related field of Conversation Analysis, we conclude the chapter with a review of recent and ongoing developments in EM, highlighting its contemporary relevance to studies of social praxis (e.g., culture, morality), embodied action, solitary social action, and the interaction order.
Discourse Studies, 2018
Contributors to the 2016 Special Issue of Discourse Studies on the ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ (Eo... more Contributors to the 2016 Special Issue of Discourse Studies on the ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ (EoE) claim that studies of epistemics in interaction (how participants display orientations to their own and others’ states of knowledge) have lost the ‘radical’ character of groundbreaking work in ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA). We suggest that the critiques and related writings are a kind of mandarin EM, lacking an adequate definition of ‘radical’, other than to invoke brief and by now familiar statements from Garfinkel and Sacks regarding the pursuit of ‘ordinary everyday activities’ and the avoidance of ‘formal analysis’. Drawing on Egon Bittner’s work, we further suggest that the EoE group shares properties and problems common to social movements claiming the mantle of radicalism. Because of their particular focus on CA and Harvey Sacks’ early work, we also demonstrate that Sacks was not, as asserted, preoccupied with the singularity of occasions. Rather, from hi...
Symbolic Interaction, 2017
Sociological Theory, 2019
Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic upsurge in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (A... more Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic upsurge in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As researchers have investigated the responsible sociohistorical conditions, they have neglected how clinicians determine the diagnosis in local encounters in the first place. Articulating a position “between Foucault and Goffman,” we ask how the interaction order of the clinic articulates with larger-scale historical forces affecting the definition and distribution of ASD. First, we show how the diagnostic process has a narrative structure. Second, case data from three decades show how narrative practices accommodate to different periods in the history of the disorder, including changing diagnostic nomenclatures. Third, we show how two different forms of abstraction—Type A, which is categorical, and Type B, which is concrete and particular—inhabit the diagnostic process. Our analysis contributes to the sociology of autism, the sociology of diagnosis, the sociology of abstraction, a...
Social Psychology Quarterly, 2019
We know a lot about why the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has risen so dramaticall... more We know a lot about why the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has risen so dramatically since the 1960s. However, social science and social psychology in particular fall short in the analysis of autistic behavior, the real-life manifestations of the disorder. In this address, I suggest that unless we tackle behavior in interaction, rather than as emanating from individuals, we cannot analytically comprehend behavior as a socially real and holistic entity. The particular phenomena under investigation is transpositioning, or how a neurotypical (NT) professional initiates a sequence of action (first position) involving a recipient who has ASD. Then, the person with ASD fashions a response (second position) that is resistive or noncooperative. However, the NT professional subsequently fashions an action that portrays the ASD person’s second position or responsive behavior as an initiation or feature independent of what may have prompted it. Moreover, in reporting on the event...
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Papers by douglas maynard