Academic literature on the topic 'Ethnomethodological investigation'

This investigation examines ‘teasing’ of non-combatant children by US military service personnel in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. The majority of existent investigations of teasing and related practices place significant conceptual importance on the intentions of the teaser – such that a target can understand that the tease is not true. However, in data examined here it appears that targets (children) do not understand the language in which the teasing is undertaken. Drawing from publicly available video footage posted on the video sharing website Liveleak, we provide an ethnomethodological (e.g., Garfinkel 1967) and conversation analytic informed (e.g., Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 2007) examination of how persons initiating teasing (soldiers) strategically exploit asymmetries in the sequential and preferential organization of interactions when tease recipients (children) do not have sufficient English skills to redress (or understand) the negative assessments being made of them. Three types of candidate teasing practices are identified: soldier initiated negative other-assessments; target parroting negative other-assessments; and offer-withdrawal games. Analysis examines how such interactions effectively fail as teases and explores how children can resist soldiers’ pursuit of degrading responses.

The ArgumentThere can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin (1988) calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work (Garfinkel 1986; Garfinkel et al. 1981; Garfinkel et al. 1989; Livingston 1986; Liberman 1985; Lynch 1985a; Lynch et al. 1983; Bjelic and Lynch forthcoming; Morrison 1990; MacBeth 1989). Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organized topical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material (and no less social) than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting.

AbstractThis article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with Gurwitsch’s demonstrations with line drawings and other abstract examples, and suggests how they can be used to suggest original procedures for investigating the vicissitudes of embodied practical actions in the lifeworld. This introduction to the lecture aims to provide some background on the scope of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological critique and elaboration of Gestalt theory and Garfinkel’s “misreading” of it in terms of his own conceptions of indexicality and accountability, and ethnomethodological investigations of the production of social order.

Editors’ AbstractDuring the 1992–1993 academic year, Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) offered a graduate seminar on Ethnomethodology in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. One topic that was given extensive coverage in the seminar has not been discussed at much length in Garfinkel’s published works to date: Aron Gurwitsch’s treatment of Gestalt theory, and particularly the themes of “phenomenal field” and “praxeological description”. The edited transcript of Garfinkel’s seminar shows why he recommended that “for the serious initiatives of ethnomethodological investigations […] Gurwitsch is a theorist we can’t do without”. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” is not a mistaken reading, but is more a matter of taking Gurwitsch’s phenomenological demonstrations of Gestalt contextures in phenomenal fields and transposing them for making detailed, concrete observations and descriptions of organizationally achieved social phenomena. Where Gurwitsch addresses the organization of perception as an autochthonous achievement, inherent to the stream and field of individual consciousness, Garfinkel extends and elaborates this field into the social world of enacted practices. The April 1993 seminar also is rich with brief asides and digressions in which Garfinkel comments about his use of Alfred Schutz, his attitude toward publishing, his relationship with Erving Goffman, and many other matters.

This article examines the character of a small but detailed observational study that focused on two teams of researchers, one engaged in qualitative sociological research, the other developing statistical models. The study was presented as investigating ‘the social life of methods’, an approach seen by some as displacing conventional research methodology. The study drew on ethnomethodology, and was offered as a direct parallel with ethnographic and ethnomethodological investigations of natural scientists’ work by Science and Technology Studies scholars. In the articles deriving from this study, the authors show how even the statisticians relied on background qualitative knowledge about the social phenomena to which their data related. The articles also document routine practices employed by each set of researchers, some ‘troubles’ they encountered and how they dealt with these. Another theme addressed is whether the distinction between quantitative and qualitative approaches accurately characterised differences between these researchers at the level of practical reasoning. While this research is presented as descriptive in orientation, concerned simply with documenting social science practices, it operates against a background of at least implicit critique. I examine its character and the closely associated criticism of social research methodology and conventional social science.

Indoor sport climbing performed by athletes with visual impairment is realized by trainer and climber working as a couple and is routinely based on instructions. It can be considered a perspicuous setting (Garfinkel, 2002) for investigating how sighted and visually impaired participants coordinate their perception and actions in the material environment while accomplishing mobile tasks. Drawing on previous ethnomethodological and CA studies on instructions in mobile activities, the analysis of an excerpt of a guided climbing session provides the ground for a detailed description of some features of instructions that are specific to this context. The analysis aims at showing that the trainer’s instructions are not only timely adjusted to the course of action, but, importantly, that they also display the trainer’s orientation to the climber’s sensory impairment.

Simulators provide great promises of pedagogical utility in a wide array of practices. This study focuses on the use of a full-scale mannequin simulator in training of personnel at an intensive care unit at a Swedish hospital. In medicine, simulators are a means of doing realistic training without risks for the patient. Simulators for use in intensive care medicine are built to resemble as closely as possible the human physiology. In the studied sessions the simulator (a Laerdal SimMan) is set up to be an as-authentic-as-possible replication of the nurses regular, day-to-day practice.

In examining the training-sessions, it was found that the participants often did other things than “proper” simulation, such as joking or making comments about the simulation. These “transgressional activities” were studied from a perspective of ethnomethodology, using video-recordings of the session. These were transcribed and analyzed in detail using ethnomethodologically informed interaction analysis.

Several themes were developed from the recordings and transcripts. These have in common that they demonstrate the participants’ own achievement and maintenance of the simulation as a distinct activity. The analysis provides an account of how the local order of the simulation is upheld, how it is breached and how the participants find their way back into doing “proper” simulation. It is an overview of the interactional methods that participants utilize to accomplish the simulation as a simulation.

This study concludes with a discussion of how this study can provide a more nuanced view of simulations, in particular the relation between simulated and “real” practices. Notions of realism, authenticity and fidelity in simulations can all be seen to be the participants’ own concern, which informs their activities in the simulation.

English is the only compulsory foreign language taught in the public education system in Taiwan. In 2001, the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the Taiwan government put the Grade 1-9 Curriculum in place. This curriculum stipulated that English be implemented in Grades 5-6 and that students in elementary school Grade 3 commenced learning English at the beginning of the 2005 academic year. Based on the general guidelines of the Language Arts within the Grade 1-9 Curriculum, schools and teachers were permitted to select their own textbooks from a select censored collection. This collection included a variety of children’s literature. Since then, the implementation of children’s literature within the regular Language Arts curriculum has grown. In particular, children’s picturebooks have been increasingly acknowledged and implemented in primary language teaching classrooms. This research study is centrally concerned with the way in which the language used in a Western children’s picturebook operates in an EFL classroom in order to achieve particular goal, be it pedagogical, social and/or cultural. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Ethnomethodology, this research study employs the analytic methods derived from these two methodological perspectives to investigate the nature of teaching practice in an EFL classroom context. One intermediate class of Grand Future Private English School located in Tainan City, Taiwan was selected as the research setting. The participants included the ten primary school students in the nominated class and their two English-teaching teachers, one Chinese English-teaching teacher and one Foreign English-teaching teacher. Yasmin’s Ducks, written in English, was the text taught in the research setting (McGraw-Hill, 2005).
Thesis (Professional Doctorate)
Doctor of Education (EdD)
School of Education and Professional Studies
Arts, Education and Law
Full Text

This thesis examines the issue of parent participation and cultural diversity in the Australian special education context. Previous research in the U.S. had suggested that the low participation by parents of culturally diverse backgrounds was due to cultural barriers that hindered their partnership with professionals. In reviewing and critiquing this previous research, it became clear that the key concepts of collaboration, disability and culture required reconceptualisation. The theoretical tools deployed in this reconceptualisation are drawn from sociocultural theory and ethnomethodology. Seventeen parents of Chinese and Vietnamese backgrounds and 20 professionals were interviewed regarding the provision of special education for children attending either a special school or special education unit. Follow-up interviews were carried out to probe specific issues related to the salience of culture in parent-professional communication, their understanding of disability, and barriers to parent participation. In addition, the communication books that were passed between parents and professionals on a regular basis were obtained for 7 of the children. These books provide a unique insight into the way parents and professionals accomplished the category of Child-with-a-disability during their entries regarding the mundane practicalities of school and home. In suspending judgment about parent-professional collaboration, this thesis adopts the multiple foci of sociocultural analysis to gain a critical understanding of parent-professional relationships through time and across personal, interpersonal, community and institutional settings. Within this framework, this thesis found that parents and professionals prefer and enact a 'communicating' type of parent participation. Their preferences seemed to depend on a range of circumstances such as their work commitments, financial resources, language resources and changing educational goals for the child. The approach taken in the thesis also affords the specification of diverse models of collaboration (e.g. obliging/directing, influencing/complying, respectful distancing, coordinating, collaborating), each of which may be regarded as worthwhile and acceptable in specific local circumstances. This study found that overall the parent-professional relationship was a trust-given one in which participants unproblematically regarded the professionals as experts. The professionals' reports revealed them to be doing accounting work - creating a moral view of the good parent and good professional. The emphasis on context in both sociocultural and ethnomethodological approaches reframes parental and professional discourse about disability as being context-driven. In employing Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to examine parents' and professionals' descriptions of the child in the communication book and the research interviews, positive as well as negative attributes of the child were obtained. Interpreting the findings in terms of the context of home and school reveals how negative attributes of the child became foregrounded. For example, the orientation to the child as lacking capacity to remember was an outcome of parents and professionals orienting to their (institutional) roles and responsibilities to manage the practicalities of school. The comparison of views reveals strong agreement between the parents and professionals about the child. Interpreting the data based on the task-at-hand of particular data collection settings provides one explanation. For instance, the communication book is a site where parents and professionals align with each other to co-construct a version of the child. Culture is not treated as a static set of traits and behavioural norms that accounts for the communication difficulties between Western-trained professionals and culturally-diverse parents. Rather, culture is theorised in this thesis as an evolving set of semiotic resources and repertoires of practice that participants draw upon and enact in their everyday activities. Using MCA, the ways in which participants deployed cultural categories, the social ends achieved by such deployment, and the attributes they assigned to these cultural categories, are documented. This approach takes cultural difference to be a resource that people use to account for conflicts, rather than as a determining cause of conflict. The documentation of how participants legitimised their explanations to add credibility to their accounts captures their moment-by-moment cultural categorisation work. In comparison to prior research, the significance of this approach is that it looks seriously at the parents' and professionals' mundane and enacted notions of collaboration and participation, the child with a disability, and culture. This thesis has interwoven several data sources and applied complementary analytics in order to reveal and understand some of the everyday complexity of cross-cultural parent professional interaction in the special education context. There is reason to look carefully at the daily achievements of the participants for it is where the intricacies of a phenomenon lie.

This thesis examines the issue of parent participation and cultural diversity in the Australian special education context. Previous research in the U.S. had suggested that the low participation by parents of culturally diverse backgrounds was due to cultural barriers that hindered their partnership with professionals. In reviewing and critiquing this previous research, it became clear that the key concepts of collaboration, disability and culture required reconceptualisation. The theoretical tools deployed in this reconceptualisation are drawn from sociocultural theory and ethnomethodology. Seventeen parents of Chinese and Vietnamese backgrounds and 20 professionals were interviewed regarding the provision of special education for children attending either a special school or special education unit. Follow-up interviews were carried out to probe specific issues related to the salience of culture in parent-professional communication, their understanding of disability, and barriers to parent participation. In addition, the communication books that were passed between parents and professionals on a regular basis were obtained for 7 of the children. These books provide a unique insight into the way parents and professionals accomplished the category of Child-with-a-disability during their entries regarding the mundane practicalities of school and home. In suspending judgment about parent-professional collaboration, this thesis adopts the multiple foci of sociocultural analysis to gain a critical understanding of parent-professional relationships through time and across personal, interpersonal, community and institutional settings. Within this framework, this thesis found that parents and professionals prefer and enact a 'communicating' type of parent participation. Their preferences seemed to depend on a range of circumstances such as their work commitments, financial resources, language resources and changing educational goals for the child. The approach taken in the thesis also affords the specification of diverse models of collaboration (e.g. obliging/directing, influencing/complying, respectful distancing, coordinating, collaborating), each of which may be regarded as worthwhile and acceptable in specific local circumstances. This study found that overall the parent-professional relationship was a trust-given one in which participants unproblematically regarded the professionals as experts. The professionals' reports revealed them to be doing accounting work - creating a moral view of the good parent and good professional. The emphasis on context in both sociocultural and ethnomethodological approaches reframes parental and professional discourse about disability as being context-driven. In employing Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to examine parents' and professionals' descriptions of the child in the communication book and the research interviews, positive as well as negative attributes of the child were obtained. Interpreting the findings in terms of the context of home and school reveals how negative attributes of the child became foregrounded. For example, the orientation to the child as lacking capacity to remember was an outcome of parents and professionals orienting to their (institutional) roles and responsibilities to manage the practicalities of school. The comparison of views reveals strong agreement between the parents and professionals about the child. Interpreting the data based on the task-at-hand of particular data collection settings provides one explanation. For instance, the communication book is a site where parents and professionals align with each other to co-construct a version of the child. Culture is not treated as a static set of traits and behavioural norms that accounts for the communication difficulties between Western-trained professionals and culturally-diverse parents. Rather, culture is theorised in this thesis as an evolving set of semiotic resources and repertoires of practice that participants draw upon and enact in their everyday activities. Using MCA, the ways in which participants deployed cultural categories, the social ends achieved by such deployment, and the attributes they assigned to these cultural categories, are documented. This approach takes cultural difference to be a resource that people use to account for conflicts, rather than as a determining cause of conflict. The documentation of how participants legitimised their explanations to add credibility to their accounts captures their moment-by-moment cultural categorisation work. In comparison to prior research, the significance of this approach is that it looks seriously at the parents' and professionals' mundane and enacted notions of collaboration and participation, the child with a disability, and culture. This thesis has interwoven several data sources and applied complementary analytics in order to reveal and understand some of the everyday complexity of cross-cultural parent professional interaction in the special education context. There is reason to look carefully at the daily achievements of the participants for it is where the intricacies of a phenomenon lie.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Education and Professional Studies
Full Text

This study investigates current teaching practice of the classroom religion program in two preschool settings in the Archdiocese of Brisbane. It also examines the approach to, and construction of, religious education in key Church and Brisbane Archdiocesan documents. Since the first Catholic school opened in Australia in 1820, research and scholarship have elucidated deeper understandings of the nature and purpose of religious education. Over time, a variety of approaches and curriculum models for the classroom religion program have been implemented in both primary and secondary schools. Broadly speaking there are two approaches to the Catholic primary school classroom religion program: educational and catechetical. The educational approach does not presume students' faith, and aims to develop students' religious literacy. The catechetical presumes student faith and aims to develop it. Currently, the Brisbane Catholic Education Religious Education Guidelines (Barry & Brennan, 1997a, 1997b; Barry et al., 2003) adopts an educational approach to the classroom religion program. However, while the approach to religious education in Catholic primary and secondary schools has received scholarly and professional attention over the years, the nature and purpose of religious education in early childhood education in the context of the Catholic preschool, have received minimal attention. Although the first preschools in Catholic schools in the Brisbane Archdiocese opened in 1988, there is no set curriculum for the classroom religion program for the preschool sector. However, Brisbane Catholic Education is presently preparing such a document in preparation for the introduction of the preparatory year of schooling into all Archdiocesan Catholic schools in 2007. The specific focus of the study is to use teachers' talk-in-interaction with their students during classroom religion lessons, as a means to exemplify their approaches to, and constructions of, their classroom religion programs. Underpinned by an Ethnomethodological methodology, the study gathered data in the form of lesson recordings from two preschool teachers. The lesson transcripts are analysed using the ethnomethodological analytic tools of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis. These analyses reveal deep insights into teachers' practices: the nature of the content they present, their approaches to, and constructions of, their religion programs, as well as the ways in which they construct their students. In addition to classroom practice, this study also investigates relevant sections of the key Church documents The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School (Congregation for Catholic Education, 1988) and the General Directory of Catechesis (Congregation for the Clergy, 1997), as well as the Archdiocese of Brisbane Catholic Education document, 'Religious Education in Preschools', which is part of the Preschool Handbook: Towards Continuity of Learning in the Early Years (Catholic Education Archdiocese of Brisbane, 2002b). Together with the Ethnomethodological methodology, this part of the investigation adopts a functional linguistic methodology using the analytic technique, Systemic Functional Linguistics. Both Systemic Functional Linguistics and Membership Categorisation Analysis are used to explicate these documents. The two Church documents are critical documents, as they contribute to curriculum development and implementation of the classroom religion program in all Australian Catholic schools, whilst the Brisbane document outlines the current policy for religious education in Catholic preschools in the Archdiocese. These analyses elucidate key insights into how the classroom religion program is approached, and reveal that whilst the Church documents maintain an educational approach, aspects of the documents are ambiguous. Analysis of the Brisbane Archdiocesan preschool document reveal it to be at variance with the current educational approach taken by the Archdiocese in its classroom religion curriculum for primary and secondary schools. This study contributes significantly to the nature and purpose of religious education in the early years. It has implications for the theory and practice of the classroom religion program in early childhood, and for preservice and inservice teacher education programs. It also contributes to policy design that guides and shapes curriculum development and implementation. The use of analytic techniques drawn from two different methodologies, Ethnomethodology and functional linguistics, enables a detailed and in-depth analysis, showing them to be effective techniques to be used together in research. These methodologies complement each other to reveal critical insights into both the document studies and teacher classroom interaction. The nature and purpose of religious education in early childhood education is evolving. As Catholic dioceses continue to expand into early childhood education, the focus on religious education in this sector becomes more critical. This study provides a significant foundation for future research.

This study investigates current teaching practice of the classroom religion program in two preschool settings in the Archdiocese of Brisbane. It also examines the approach to, and construction of, religious education in key Church and Brisbane Archdiocesan documents. Since the first Catholic school opened in Australia in 1820, research and scholarship have elucidated deeper understandings of the nature and purpose of religious education. Over time, a variety of approaches and curriculum models for the classroom religion program have been implemented in both primary and secondary schools. Broadly speaking there are two approaches to the Catholic primary school classroom religion program: educational and catechetical. The educational approach does not presume students' faith, and aims to develop students' religious literacy. The catechetical presumes student faith and aims to develop it. Currently, the Brisbane Catholic Education Religious Education Guidelines (Barry & Brennan, 1997a, 1997b; Barry et al., 2003) adopts an educational approach to the classroom religion program. However, while the approach to religious education in Catholic primary and secondary schools has received scholarly and professional attention over the years, the nature and purpose of religious education in early childhood education in the context of the Catholic preschool, have received minimal attention. Although the first preschools in Catholic schools in the Brisbane Archdiocese opened in 1988, there is no set curriculum for the classroom religion program for the preschool sector. However, Brisbane Catholic Education is presently preparing such a document in preparation for the introduction of the preparatory year of schooling into all Archdiocesan Catholic schools in 2007. The specific focus of the study is to use teachers' talk-in-interaction with their students during classroom religion lessons, as a means to exemplify their approaches to, and constructions of, their classroom religion programs. Underpinned by an Ethnomethodological methodology, the study gathered data in the form of lesson recordings from two preschool teachers. The lesson transcripts are analysed using the ethnomethodological analytic tools of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis. These analyses reveal deep insights into teachers' practices: the nature of the content they present, their approaches to, and constructions of, their religion programs, as well as the ways in which they construct their students. In addition to classroom practice, this study also investigates relevant sections of the key Church documents The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School (Congregation for Catholic Education, 1988) and the General Directory of Catechesis (Congregation for the Clergy, 1997), as well as the Archdiocese of Brisbane Catholic Education document, 'Religious Education in Preschools', which is part of the Preschool Handbook: Towards Continuity of Learning in the Early Years (Catholic Education Archdiocese of Brisbane, 2002b). Together with the Ethnomethodological methodology, this part of the investigation adopts a functional linguistic methodology using the analytic technique, Systemic Functional Linguistics. Both Systemic Functional Linguistics and Membership Categorisation Analysis are used to explicate these documents. The two Church documents are critical documents, as they contribute to curriculum development and implementation of the classroom religion program in all Australian Catholic schools, whilst the Brisbane document outlines the current policy for religious education in Catholic preschools in the Archdiocese. These analyses elucidate key insights into how the classroom religion program is approached, and reveal that whilst the Church documents maintain an educational approach, aspects of the documents are ambiguous. Analysis of the Brisbane Archdiocesan preschool document reveal it to be at variance with the current educational approach taken by the Archdiocese in its classroom religion curriculum for primary and secondary schools. This study contributes significantly to the nature and purpose of religious education in the early years. It has implications for the theory and practice of the classroom religion program in early childhood, and for preservice and inservice teacher education programs. It also contributes to policy design that guides and shapes curriculum development and implementation. The use of analytic techniques drawn from two different methodologies, Ethnomethodology and functional linguistics, enables a detailed and in-depth analysis, showing them to be effective techniques to be used together in research. These methodologies complement each other to reveal critical insights into both the document studies and teacher classroom interaction. The nature and purpose of religious education in early childhood education is evolving. As Catholic dioceses continue to expand into early childhood education, the focus on religious education in this sector becomes more critical. This study provides a significant foundation for future research.
Thesis (Professional Doctorate)
Doctor of Education (EdD)
School of Cognition, Language and Special Education
Full Text

AbstractVideoconferencing technologies have become increasingly common in different sectors of life as a means to enable real-time interaction between people who are located in different places. In this chapter, we explore interactional data from synchronous hybrid university-level foreign language classrooms in which one student participates via a telepresence robot, a remote-controlled videoconferencing tool. In contrast to many other forms of video-mediated interaction, the user of a telepresence robot can move the robot and thereby (re-)orient to the space, the other participants and material objects that might be outside his immediate video screen. We employ an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EMCA) perspective to explore Barad’s (Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press: 2007) notion of agency as a distributed phenomenon that emerges from assemblages of humans and materials. We demonstrate the complex nature of telepresent agency by investigating where agential cuts lie in three short episodes that involve mediated perception, touch and movement. Based on the analyses, we discuss how the telepresence technology configures learning environments by making new kinds of competences and forms of adaptation relevant for teachers and students.

The disciplinary status of ethnomethodology is uncertain. It has been presented as a radical internal reform movement, aimed at re-specifying the focus of sociology; as an ‘alternate’ or supplement to it; as a discipline in its own right; or as a source of hybrid studies that complement various forms of practice. The cogency of each of these positions is considered. It is argued that ethnomethodology’s critique of social science, while salutary, seems to imply abolition rather than reform; and the proposal of its complementary relationship to conventional social science leaves open the question of why such a supplement is required. As regards ethnomethodology as a discipline, there are strong grounds for claiming that conversation analysis has provided a significant cumulative development of knowledge, but there are questions about whether its ethnomethodological character was essential to, or even compatible with, this. The ethnomethodological tradition of ‘studies of work’ has been less successful in this respect, and while it has made a practical contribution to some fields, once again it is not clear that this stems from the ethnomethodological character of the investigations. In conclusion, I suggest that the ambiguous status of ethnomethodology is built into its very nature.