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In 1952 at Princeton University, Harold Garfinkel developed a sociological theory of information. Other prominent theories then being worked out at Princeton, including game theory, neglected the social elements of "information," modeling a rational individual whose success depends on completeness of both reason and information. In real life these conditions are not possible and these approaches therefore have always had limited and problematic practical application. Garfinkel's sociological theory treats information as a thoroughly organized social phenomenon in a way that addresses these shortcomings comprehensively. Although famous as a sociologist of everyday life, Garfinkel focuses in this new book-never before published-on the concerns of large-scale organization and decisionmaking. In the fifty years since Garfinkel wrote this treatise, there has been no systematic treatment of the problems and issues he raises. Nor has anyone proposed a theory of information like the one he proposed. Many of the same problems that troubled theorists of information and predictable order in 1952 are still problematic today.
In this original and controversial book Professor Rawls argues that Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is the crowning achievement of his sociological endeavour and that since its publication in English in 1915 it has been consistently misunderstood. Rather than a work on primitive religion or the sociology of knowledge, Rawls asserts that it is an attempt by Durkheim to establish a unique epistemological basis for the study of sociology and moral relations. By privileging social practice over beliefs and ideas, it avoids the dilemmas inherent in philosophical approaches to knowledge and morality that are based on individualism and the tendency to privilege beliefs and ideas over practices, both tendencies that dominate western thought. Based on detailed textual analysis of the primary text, this book will be an important and original contribution to contemporary debates on social theory and philosophy.
Although not widely known, Harold Garfinkel pioneered the use of ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology. He influenced generations of scholars and researchers.This expanded and updated edition of Garfinkel's classic Studies in Ethnomethodology includes, for the first time, additional Garfinkel papers that helped form the author's ideas.This is the fullest and most authoritative edition ever published. It gives readers a chance to see how Garfinkel developed his path-breaking ideas and later expanded them into new lines of thought.
Since the 1967 publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel has indelibly influenced the social sciences and humanities worldwide. This new book, the long-awaited sequel to Studies, comprises Garfinkel's work over three decades to further elaborate the study of ethnomethodology. 'Working out Durkheim's Aphorism, ' the title used for this new book, emphasizes Garfinkel's insistence that his position focuses on fundamental sociological issues--and that interpretations of his position as indifferent to sociology have been misunderstandings. Durkheim's aphorism states that the concreteness of social facts is sociology's most fundamental phenomenon. Garfinkel argues that sociologi...
Respecifying Lab Ethnography delivers the first ethnomethodological study of current experimental physics in action, describing the disciplinary orientation of lab work and exploring the discipline in its social order, formal stringency and skilful performance - in situ and in vivo. Drawing upon extensive participant observation, this book articulates and draws upon two major strands of ethnomethodological inquiry: reflexive ethnography and video analysis. In bringing together these two approaches, which have hitherto existed in parallel, Respecifying Lab Ethnography introduces a practice-based video analysis. In doing so, the book recasts conventional distinctions to shed fresh light on methodological issues surrounding the descriptive investigation of social practices more broadly. An engaged and innovative study of the encountered worksite, this book will appeal not only to sociologists with interests in ethnomethodology and the sociology of work, but also to scholars of science and technology studies and those working in the fields of ethnography and social science methodology.
Why “the Muslim question” is really about the West and its own anxieties—not Islam In this fearless, original book, Anne Norton demolishes the notion that there is a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam. What is really in question, she argues, is the West’s commitment to its own ideals: to democracy and the Enlightenment trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the most fundamental sense, the Muslim question is about the values not of Islamic, but of Western, civilization.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Typically residing in areas of concentrated urban poverty, too many young black men are trapped in a horrific cycle that includes active discrimination, unemployment, violence, crime, prison, and early death. This toxic mixture has given rise to wider stereotypes that limit the social capital of all young black males. Edited and with an introductory chapter by sociologist Elijah Anderson, the essays in Against the Wall describe how the young black man has come to be identified publicly with crime and violence. In reaction to his sense of rejection, he may place an exaggerated emphasis on the integrity of his self-expression in clot...
Presenting original research studies by leading scholars in the field, Orders of Ordinary Action considers how ethnomethodology provides for an 'alternate' sociology by respecifying sociological phenomena as locally accomplished members' activities. Both individually and collectively, these contributions illustrate how taking an ethnomethodological approach opens up for investigation phenomena that are taken for granted in conventional sociological theorizing.
"The book contributes to social psychology's Milgram paradigm and the sociology of morality by offering an original theory of the emergence of moral dilemmas in social interaction. Taking Milgram's notorious "obedience" experiments as a case study of morality in interaction, it argues that Milgram's "obedient" and "defiant" behavioural outcomes should be understood in terms of the tension between participants' moral obligations to the confederate Learner and their institutional obligations to the confederate Experimenter. Using the theoretical and methodological approach of ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the book analyses a large number of archived audio-recordings of Milgram's e...
This book-never before published-is eminent sociologist Harold Garfinkel's earliest attempt, while at Harvard in 1948, to bridge the growing gap in American sociology. This gap was generated by a Parsonian paradigm that emphasised a scientific approach to sociological description, one that increasingly distanced itself from social phenomena in the increasingly influential ways studied by phenomenologists. It was Garfinkel's idea that phenomenological description, rendered in more empirical and interactive terms, might remedy shortcomings in the reigning Parsonian view. Garfinkel soon gave up the attempt to repair scientific description, and his focus became increasingly empirical until, in 1...