Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology is a field of sociology that studies the commonsense resources, procedures, and practices through which the members of a culture produce and recognize mutually intelligible objects, events, and courses of action. The field emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to a range of sociological perspectives, most prominently structural functionalism, which treated conduct as causally determined by social structural factors. In contrast, ethnomethodology stressed that social actions and social organization are produced by knowledgeable agents who guide their actions by the use of situated commonsense reasoning. Rather than treating the achievement of social organization as a given from which the analysis of social structure could proceed, ethnomethodological research was directed at the hidden social processes underlying that achievement. The resulting research focus on the properties of commonsense knowledge and reasoning represents one strand of what has been termed the "cognitive revolution" in the social sciences. As a sociological perspective however, ethnomethodology deals with the socially shared and publicly accountable nature of commonsense reasoning rather than with psychological aspects of cognitive processes. Its primary research stance has been descriptive and naturalistic rather than explanatory or experimental.
Background and Development
The basic outlook of ethnomethodology was developed by Harold Garfinkel (1967a) during a twenty-year period spanning graduate research at Harvard under the supervision of Talcott Parsons through an extensive number of empirical investigations at UCLA.
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